December 23rd, 2009
Zoom The Fast Rise and Slow Downfall of Duke Nukem I remember when I played Duke Nuken 3D on my Hewlett Packard computer during the days of Prodigy, AOL chat rooms, and Sid Mier’s Civilization. It was the coolest thing out there and paved the way for the likes of Halo, Call of Duty, etc. I always wondered what happened to it, and this article was an awesome breakdown of how it fell from grace. Working in a startup myself, I kept finding myself yelling in my head starting at page 2, “Ship the damn thing already!”. It was just sad to see how a company got paralyzed in shipping their sequel just because they always wanted to be the best at the time. In reality, they could have shipped it earlier and the customers would have been happy with it. Twelve years is a lot, especially in gaming. That could have produced 4-6 Duke Nukem titles, but all they had to show for it was their initial success of Duke Nukem 3D and that’s just unfortunate. Key Takeaways: Ship quickly and often Be OK with 80% Be weary of feature creep It’s always good to have push back Question: Did you play Duke Nukem 3D and would you play it if they shipped the sequel today?

The Fast Rise and Slow Downfall of Duke Nukem

I remember when I played Duke Nuken 3D on my Hewlett Packard computer during the days of Prodigy, AOL chat rooms, and Sid Mier’s Civilization. It was the coolest thing out there and paved the way for the likes of Halo, Call of Duty, etc. I always wondered what happened to it, and this article was an awesome breakdown of how it fell from grace.

Working in a startup myself, I kept finding myself yelling in my head starting at page 2, “Ship the damn thing already!”. It was just sad to see how a company got paralyzed in shipping their sequel just because they always wanted to be the best at the time.

In reality, they could have shipped it earlier and the customers would have been happy with it. Twelve years is a lot, especially in gaming. That could have produced 4-6 Duke Nukem titles, but all they had to show for it was their initial success of Duke Nukem 3D and that’s just unfortunate.

Key Takeaways:

  • Ship quickly and often
  • Be OK with 80%
  • Be weary of feature creep
  • It’s always good to have push back

Question: Did you play Duke Nukem 3D and would you play it if they shipped the sequel today?

3 notes · Comments
  1. josephsunga reblogged this from caterpillarcowboy and added:
    Definitely, there were a ton of advances during that time and I think those distracted their team from shipping the...
  2. aaronwhite answered: agreed, also:: quickly & often for big video games isn’t appropriate work. But shipping is still a feature.
  3. caterpillarcowboy reblogged this from josephsunga and added:
    important distinction, which...design versus state-of-the-art technology.
  4. josephsunga posted this
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