A year ago, it looked like Duke Nukem Forever was finally dead. The perennial Wired.com Vaporware Awards winner, in the works since April 1997, couldn’t be completed since Dallas-based developer 3D Realms shut its doors and laid off its entire staff. Publisher Take-Two Interactive responded by suing 3D Realms parent company, Apogee Software.

Enter Pitchford, co-founder and president of Gearbox Software, another Dallas videogame company. As an alumnus of 3D Realms, he wanted nothing more than to see the over-the-top shooter starring the misogynist Duke finally come to fruition. And his studio’s slick hybrid game Borderlands was a feather in Take-Two’s cap.

“I didn’t want the dream to die,” Pitchford says. So he bought the rights to Duke for an undisclosed amount, then proposed to the publisher that the lawsuits be dropped and Gearbox be allowed to finish the game.

Pitchford appears to have succeeded. At videogame convention Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle last weekend, 2K Games and Gearbox took the wraps off a resurrected Duke Nukem Forever, with Pitchford personally pitching the game to a group of incredulous gamers every half-hour.

In a tucked-away section of the Duke booth Saturday afternoon, Pitchford answered Wired.com’s burning questions about the game that almost never was.

Wired.com: What happened between the closure of 3D Realms and today?

Randy Pitchford: Well, the story goes back further than that. What a lot of people don’t know is that I got started as a professional gamemaker when I moved out to Texas to join George Broussard and Scott Miller and Allen Blum who created Duke Nukem, to join those guys and become part of the Duke Nukem 3D. I owe my career to Duke.

We were on the outside like everyone else, watching Duke as fans, not as developers. Wired gave Duke Nukem Forever the first Vaporware Award, and then the next year it won No. 1 vaporware again, and then again and again until Wired decided, you know what? Duke Nukem is just going to get the lifetime achievement award for vaporware. And that was like five years ago. So it’s become legendary. And Duke Nukem, I think he is the most iconic videogame character in the industry. I think Lara Croft is the female and Duke Nukem is the male. Between them, they’re the most iconic figures in videogames.

So all of us on the outside went through the full range of emotions: “Sweet, we want the sequel!” “Man, it’s taking them a while.” “Man, that trailer looks awesome, I’m totally ready!” “Seriously, guys, what’s wrong?” And we’d been through this loop so many times. And then we all got the bad news last year. The story was, 3D Realms was shutting down, closing the doors. The rumor was the development team was laid off. The story was there were lawsuits — drama, drama, drama. The story was that the Duke was dead and the dream was over. And this thing that so many of us were still wishing was going to find a way to break through this vaporware curse, it was over.

And here we are today now, playing the game. So what happened between those things, that’s your question. The reality is, that day when everybody lost their jobs, there were some people, Allen Blum being one of them, the core of what Duke is all about, they couldn’t let the dream die. A lot of the newer guys, they scattered to the winds, they all got jobs in the industry. But Allen and a handful of guys couldn’t let the dream die. Besides Duke, they didn’t even know what else to do. And so they started working out of their houses, just trying to keep the dream alive. George and Scott did the best they could to support them and help them. George, he’s been with this the whole time, this has been a labor of love and also it’s consumed him, to make Duke Nukem Forever the best game it could possibly be.

For my part, when I heard that news, I didn’t want to see the Duke die. I called up George, and he said to me, “This is the worst day of my life.” I found out about Allen and those guys keeping it going. And I knew that my studio could be in a position to help, for a couple reasons.

First of all, I feel like I owe my career to Duke, and I’m not alone. A lot of the guys at Gearbox had worked on Duke Nukem 3D, and a lot of the guys worked on Duke Nukem Forever. We felt like Duke was a part of us, too. And we were in a position where we knew that we could help. And I believed that George and Scott could trust me, because I knew that they knew that I knew what the brand was all about. Take-Two, because we were working on Borderlands together, they could trust us. We were in this weird, unique position where we could help everybody come together in Duke’s time of need.

It was risky. I had to put myself in the middle of it, I had to put my studio in the middle of it, and we had to take a bet. We had to spend money, we had to put resources on things. We had to take a big risk. It’s funny, they say you should always bet on Duke, and we did. And it paid off. We helped the lawsuit go away and settled that for everyone.

Wired.com: Take-Two was trying to get the rights to the underlying game code?

Pitchford: Take-Two wanted the game to get to customers. Take-Two had the publishing rights, and they wanted to publish a game. I can’t speak on behalf of Take-Two, but the moment that bad news happened, if I’m Take-Two, I’m thinking, “Shit! That thing that I want to have happen, that’s broken now. I have to intervene, I can’t fix this.”

Wired.com: But this was not them coming to you saying, “We need somebody to finish this game.”

Pitchford: No, I worked this out with George and Scott, and I bought the brand. I bought Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem Forever, and they gave it to me because they trusted that we would do the right thing with it. And I started funding the guys like Allen, and brought them in. About a third of the Duke Nukem Forever team, including what I consider the full core.

These guys went to war together. They’ve banded together, they are called Triptych [Games], and they’re on our 10th floor. Their world got shattered, and the best thing that I could do was fund them, show them the support, help them and give them the opportunity to play the role they must play in seeing this through.

You’re going to become Duke Nukem and you’re going to save the motherfuckin’ world! But you also want to get online and beat up your friends and shoot each other and step on each other, live the full fantasy with today’s modern gameplay. So there was a big investment to make there, too.

Pages: 1 2 View All

Authors: Chris Kohler

to know more click here