Duke Nukem Forever Is Gold

[A Black Falcon]

That's not right ASM, 3D Realms never got additional outside funding. That's why they had to fire the team in May '09, because they couldn't get Take Two to give them the money they needed to finish it, since they'd finally run out of their own funds.

Take Two may have given them some money at some point, years and years ago, for development, when the publishing deal was signed or something (I'm not certain offhand), but there certainly was no continuing funding coming to 3DR, and none came at the end, which is why things ended as they did.

Why do you keep saying that it was finished by a "tiny group"? Triptych continued to work on the game by themselves after 3D Realms went bust, but before 2K stepped in. After 2K stepped in, Gearbox joined the development and provided the man-power necessary to finish it.

I was referring to Triptych, which is a small group of people who had worked for 3DR and were fired when the team was dropped as described above, who decided to finish the game on their own and worked on it for some time without pay before Gearbox picked it up for completion. From what I've heard, by the time Gearbox got it (and moved Triptych in with them to complete the work) it was mostly complete; I'm not entirely sure what exactly Gearbox itself was doing on the game. More final polish, I imagine... plus testing, bugfixing, etc. But I don't know how much actual design/programming they did on the game. Not most of it I'm pretty sure, but they could have done more than I think, I'm not sure... it's hard to sort out exactly who did what.

Neither of those two groups had anything [or, at least, very much] to do with the multiplayer or the console ports, which was handled by Piranha Games.

True.