Joseph Sunga's Thoughts

caterpillarcowboy:

josephsunga:

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, thought 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?

While I agree with you, there is an important distinction, which is perfection in design versus state-of-the-art technology. Duke Nukem Forever never shipped because advances in computer hardware and 3D engines coupled with the long development necessary to code for these new technologies made state-of-the-art impossible. They could have shipped an incredibly fun, intuitive, beautiful game with last year’s tech and still done very, very well.

Definitely, there were a ton of advances during that time and I think those distracted their team from shipping the sequel. When you have a community of eager fans urging for the sequel and are happy with the screenshots/demos you’ve provided them, you got to ship it. You don’t switch your whole engine when you’re so close and delay for years. Ship the sequel, improve the engines for the next installment of Duke Nukem.

Oh well, Call of Duty and Halo fill my life nowadays — we’ll see if Duke Nukem sees the light of day.