Chip's Challenge 2: The real most delayed game of all times?

[A Black Falcon]

DNF was under development by a fairly small team for a AAA game, and it was rebooted repeatedly during development as George Broussard always wanted to keep up with advancements in the genre, ultimately to the games' detriment. Basically it had no controls on its development because 3DR funded most of the games' development themselves, so there was no publisher keeping them on track, demanding builds, etc... at least, not until the end, when their money finally ran out and they had to go to the publisher. The publishers had had enough after a while though and didn't keep giving them money, so 3DR had to fire almost everyone and pretty much shut down. A few staff then went to finish the game on their own, first on their own and then with Gearbox, who of course published the final game. The version that was released started development somewhere around '07 (and released a few years later), if I remember correctly; it wasn't the same version that had been in development since the late '90s.

DNF is a game I followed during development of course, as I really loved Apogee's games back in the early to mid '90s, particularly their platformers. I haven't played much of the final game, but it seemed okay from what little I played. So yeah, I can't exactly say "DNF is actually a great game" since I only played a bit of it, but I will defend its development, as I believe the people at 3DR when they say that they worked on it that whole time, it just never came together due to the issues described above and more. With someone telling George Broussard 'enough, finish THIS version' we could have had it a lot sooner, I think... and with how great that 2001 trailer was, I wish that had happened. Being able to self-fund is the ideal situation of course as no one likes having someone else control when you get paid, but Broussard proved himself unable to resist the temptation of endless upgrades that keep the game from actually finishing, so he probably needed it.

In comparison, Half-Life 3? From everything we know, it hasn't been in development in any form in years now. Today's Valve only wants to make games which have endless replay value online and huge amounts of DLC money-hooks built in, not single player shooters. I don't think it's similar to DNF's situation at all.