Apogee/3D Realms bought by Interceptor Entertainment

[A Black Falcon]

I hate to say it, but GR's right. 3DRealms just isn't really making anything any more. Duke Nukem Forever was the only thing they were actually working on, and having seen what they actually put together, yeah, no one was really impressed (and no, arguments that it "wasn't finished" don't apply to a game over 10 years in the making). To be frank, I honestly suspect that 3DRealms was a "front company" who's entire purpose was to funnel cash into the pockets of some lazy programmers who really didn't care about making games any more. It certainly would make a LOT more sense than suggesting that Duke Nukem Forever realistically represents the dedicated effort of 10 years worth of labor. GearBox takes a lot of blame for releasing such a sub-par game, but the fault isn't entirely with them. They salvaged what was actually there, and there wasn't much there to begin with.

Oh come on, THIS stupid false conspiracy case again? You haven't read about the games' development? There have been some pretty interesting articles about it, even though the whole story isn't out there, yet at least.

First, the game only ever had a fairly small team. This meant that development would take a while, versus a company with a large team. People keep forgetting this when they focus on how long DNF took.

Second, DNF was restarted multiple times during development. The basic issue is that George Broussard and Scott Miller, the two guys who owned Apogee/3DR, had a lot of money, so there was virtually no need to control timetables. The game was entirely self-funded by the two of them, and Broussard proved to not be very good at managing things with a project that big -- he kept wanting to keep up with everyone else and do the new stuff in the genre, so instead of actually finishing what they had, they'd reboot the game yet again instead.

Third, the key decisions Broussard made which led to a version which could actually be finished, but also probably ruined the game, were centered around making it more easily able to run on consoles. Prey had been a success on the PS3 and X360, so he decided to focus Duke 3D more on consoles... so the developers had to go back and downscale everything so that it'd fit into the limited RAM of the PS3 and 360. They also hired some new staff, to staff up for the final push. Apparently there was friction between the new people and the ones who had been there for years, and this became a problem. Anyway though, the problem here is that these decisions -- to cut lots of levels and the female character who was going to help Duke (Bombshell), scale down area sizes and textures, add in regenerating health, put in a two weapon limit, and the like -- hurt the game badly. I don't know if they could have finished the original version, but it'd have been better to stick wtih that than compromise it so badly that the game was ruined... and the scaling-up at the end is probably what finished off 3DR, anyway, financially. That Max Payne and Prey money ran out much quicker once they had a lot more people.

Fourth, despite the above, the final version of DNF, which was released in 2011, had been almost finished by 3D Realms when they ran out of money. Specifically, the PC version was almost done; they hadn't worked on console ports or multiplayer yet. However, the publisher refused to give them any money to finish the game with, so they went under instead, and Gearbox stepped in to save the game. They also found teams to do the (thoroughly mediocre) console ports, and make the multiplayer mode, and hired some ex-3DR staff, who went by the name Triptych Games for the project, to help patch together what was finished. Basically what they did is take the game at its last state in 3DR, fix it up a bit, and ship it. They eventually did do two DLC packs, one of them of single-player content; I think that might have just been some of the stuff that had been cut as 3DR went down and tried to piece together what they had into a functioning game. There was originally more, though.

So yeah, the game might have been released because they finally found a direction with the consolization approach, versus the constantly-shifting design it'd had before, but that also ruined it. If you're going to take that long to make a game, at least make it good! But no, Broussard wanted console success, so he compromised the game... but ended up making something that few people loved. It wasn't consoley enough for the console people, and was too consolized for the PC people, I think.

id games is where the actual effort seems to be, with actual real games being made every few years like Doom 3, Prey, and Rage. Sure Rage wasn't anything to write home about but at least it didn't take 10 years to get that way, and is STILL more satisfying than Duke Nukem Forever.

You know that John Carmack left id a few months ago and now works at Oculus VR, yes? id is working on Doom 4, but without Carmack who knows if it'll be any good...

Don't misunderstand me. I loved the games they produced during the old glory days of Apogee, but apogee has passed. Let's let someone actually DO something with those old licenses. I could use a new Commander Keen.

Apogee doesn't own the Keen license, Bethesda does -- Apogee was incredibly generous and didn't keep the rights to games they published, unlike virtually every other publisher ever. So Bethesda, who bought id, owns that. Apogee/3DR, or now its successors Apogee Software LLC and Interceptor, would only now have the IP rights to the games they developed themselves... except maybe Duke Nukem, depending on how that court case goes.