Duke Nukem Forever Is Gold

[Great Rumbler]

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.

I highly doubt that Gearbox grabbed up a half-finished game, slapped their name on the box, and then released it. If it was half-finished when they got it, then they finished it. But that's neither here nor there. The problem was the foundation that everything was built on and the foundation was riddled with cracks, made with poor quality concrete, and far from level. It was mess and was always going to be a mess. The only way to NOT make it a mess was to scrap the entire project and start over from scratch.

I'm not convinced that ever actually happened at 3D Realms, despite the repeated start-overs. Too many left over elements, too many left over ideas. Or that there was ever a project leader with a singular vision for what the game was going to be when it was finished, or at least not until it was far too late.