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Last year when the news that gaming studio 3D Realms had shut down, leaving the fate of signature title Duke Nukem Forever hanging in the balance, many of us surmised that the game would never be complete. Now, thanks to Gearbox Software and Take-Two Interactive (producers of the Grand Theft Auto series) the game suddenly has new life, not to mention an actual release date of - sometime next year.
Randy Pitchford, CEO of Gearbox Software declined to put a specific date on the release, seeing as his company has a lot of work ahead of it to refine the game. Keep in mind, it went into production back in 1997 and a lot has changed since then. My thought is that they actually have no choice but to completely start from scratch and build a brand new game, with the same awesome title. Pitchford is optimistic that the game will be awesome though, as it was meant to be.
"Clearly the game hadn’t been finished at 3D Realms but a lot of content had been created," he told the Wall Street Journal. “The approach and investment and process at 3D Realms didn’t quite make it and it cracked at the end. With Gearbox Software we brought all those pieces together. It’s the game it was meant to be.”
Word is that Duke Nukem Forever will have a single player and multi-player option, which we can expect to be pretty damn sweet since it's coming from the same studio that brought us the recent Borderlands and the Brothers in Arms titles. The game will be a solid sequel to Duke Nukem 3D, finally bringing Duke back to life. Even though I always thought he'd be brought to life in a movie starring Howie Long that never got made.
So does the future look bright for Duke or is this going to be yet another failed attempt to produce this game? 3D Realms put it so high on a pedestal when it was time to take it down, they couldn't make it perfect enough. In a sense, it seems like it may have a bit of a curse attached to it. Not to mention that the game they are building upon is is old. Will it be up to today's standards of gaming? With games like Army of Two, the Call of Duty series and more that offer FPS multi-player gaming, will Duke be able to hold his own? Will his wisecracks put him in a field by himself or bury him with the rest of the also-rans? Well, we'll have to wait until sometime next year to have these questions answered, but I'm optimistic that Duke will soon be kicking ass and chewing gum, and he's all out of gum.
Image: Apogee Software
