3DRealms bites the big one

[A Black Falcon]

This was posted on the 3DRealms forums (which are still up, for the moment, though the site isn't)...

http://forums.3drealms.com/vb/showthread...33&page=26

Haven't posted here in a few years. Don't know if anyone remember me, been registered under a couple of names, this being the last one. No matter. I've been here pretty long, felt that I had to say a final goodbye.

You guys were the very last bastion of the old school (ironically together with iD), and for me this is officially the end of the old PC gaming world. I've been pretty dormant in terms of gaming the last few years simply because the games are pretty much uniformly crap. It was so awesome being a gamer back when Duke3D was released. There was innovation and drive, and developers seemed to be motivated by creative spirit and wanting to make something truly worth while. Everyone knew what to do because we were all gamers. What could go wrong?

Now, we're lucky to have just a select few developers around that bother with design, with gameplay, with stuff that actually matters. Games that don't cater to the lowest common denominator, or to the publishers or the PR departements. People who made games for gamers.

I felt that 3DR was keeping some of that spirit alive, even now.

I remember when the first Quake-mockups was released in PCG UK. I was in ecstacy. Between making maps, chatting on IRC with my buds on what sector effector did what, and talking about the next LAN (where we'd play Duke, exclusively), I would drool at those shots and imagine how awesome DNF would be. That was the reality then. You could trust great developers to make great games. 3DR was keeping that naïve belief in a truly good game alive. I had that belief even after I stopped coming here to the forums. After all the vaporware babble and the endless line of haters writing crap about 3DR. Now it's all gone; and pretty much the last of the old school developers has gone down the shitter. The rest of them having been swallowed alive by suits a long time ago or having their teams being replaced by slaves for hire (read Lucasarts), or simply gone out of business because the new industry couldn't tolerate development that wasn't mass production.

So — So long to you and the old world. You'll always be part of the legacy of the golden years of gaming. Too bad you couldn't be kicking ass and taking names in this new era. If anyone could have pulled it off, it would have been you.

Indeed... one of the last real bastions of PC gaming's greatest times, gone. The first game developer I truly loved other than Nintendo (whose games I didn't actually have other than that one Game & Watch at the time I started playing Apogee games), gone. It's so, so horribly sad... :( I haven't said much because it's just so shocking and sad, but yeah... this is the worst thing I can think of in the industry since Interplay's collapse back in 2004, and before that the effective deaths of Sierra and Lucasarts. Is nobody left from the great days of computer gaming anymore? Awful... just awful. :bummed:

From Pharaoh's Tomb to Commander Keen to Dark Ages to Raptor to Duke 3D and more, Apogee developed or published some of the best computer games around... and I really did want to think that DNF would eventually come out. If it really doesn't, after all this time... wow, that's awful. I mean, I don't love FPSes (I only have Duke Nukem 3D because it came free with an issue of PC Gamer in 2000 or 2001, for instance), but still... awful.