In January 1996, the small Texas studio 3D Realms released Duke Nukem 3D. It sold about 3.5 million copies and made its two owners, George Broussard and Scott Miller, rich. In April 1997 Broussard announced the sequel, Duke Nukem Forever. There was no formal deadline, but Miller predicted it would be out “well before” Christmas 1998.
Most video games, Wired noted, take two to four years. Five is worryingly long. This one took twelve, and it was not finished.
The first reset came early. To save time, Broussard licensed a rival studio’s engine, Quake II. By May 1998 the team had enough to show a trailer at E3, the industry’s big convention. Weeks later a competitor’s engine, Unreal, looked better, and a programmer suggested switching. “The room got quiet for a moment,” Broussard recalled. Switching would mean scrapping much of the work. He switched. Later, when a new version of Unreal came out, he upgraded again.
The game had to beat every other game, the way the original had. Broussard kept asking for new features and changes. “When it’s done” became the studio’s answer whenever anyone asked when it would ship. By August 2006 at least seven people had left, nearly half the team. “I left because I was burned out after working on the same project for five years without any end in sight,” one former programmer wrote.
In 2007 the studio hired Raphael van Lierop as creative director and gave him several pieces of the game to play. They took him about five hours, far longer than Broussard expected. Van Lierop thought the game was so far along that a hard year would finish it.
No, no, Broussard told him. It was two years out.
“I thought, ‘Wow,’” van Lierop said, “‘how many times have you been here, near the finish line, and you thought you were way out?’”
A new project lead finally began pushing back on Broussard’s requests for changes. But the money was running out. Broussard and Miller had spent some $20 million of their own on the game. In 2009 they asked the publisher, Take-Two, for $6 million to finish it, and the talks broke down. On May 6, 2009, 3D Realms disbanded its development team. The next week, Take-Two sued it for failing to finish the game.