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I love that Amazon lists the PC version as coming out for “Windows 7/XP.” So telling! I don’t think there’s really an analogy to make. Vista was a failure beyond comparison.
Executive summary: The first game was too successful. Failure can be, and often is, a good thing.
"Normally, game developers don’t have much cash. Like rock bands seeking a label to help pay for the cost of recording an album, game developers usually find a publisher to give them an advance in exchange for a big slice of the profits. But Broussard and Miller didn’t need to do this. 3D Realms was flush with cash. [...] Yet the truth is, Broussard’s financial freedom had cut him off from all discipline. He could delay making the tough calls, seemingly forever. One day, Broussard came in and said, ‘We could go another five years without shipping a game’ because 3D Realms still had so much money in the bank"
Wired has a really good article from last year about why DNF was never finished: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_duke_nukem/ Executive summary: The first game was too successful. Failure can be, and often is, a good thing. " Normally, game developers don’t have much cash. Like rock bands seeking a label to help pay for the cost of recording an album, game developers usually find a publisher to give them an…
“George’s genius was realizing where games were going and taking it to the next level,” says Paul Schuytema, who worked for Broussard and Miller heading up the development of Prey, another 3D Realms title. “That was his sword and his Achilles’ heel. He’d rather throw himself on his sword and kill himself than have the game be bad.
Broussard simply couldn’t tolerate the idea of Duke Nukem Forever coming out with anything other than the latest and greatest technology and awe-inspiring gameplay. He didn’t just want it to be good. It had to surpass every other game that had ever existed, the same way the original Duke Nukem 3D had.
But because the technology kept getting better, Broussard was on a treadmill. He’d see a new game with a flashy graphics technique and demand the effect be incorporated into Duke Nukem Forever. “One day George started pushing for snow levels,” recalls a developer who worked on Duke Nukem Forever for several years starting in 2000. Why? “He had seen The Thing” — a new game based on the horror movie of the same name, set in the snowbound Antarctic — “and he wanted it.” The staff developed a running joke: If a new title comes out, don’t let George see it. When the influential shoot-’em-up Half-Life debuted in 1998, it opened with a famously interactive narrative sequence in which the player begins his workday in a laboratory, overhearing a coworker’s conversation that slowly sets a mood of dread. The day after Broussard played it, an employee told me, the cofounder walked into the office saying, “Oh my God, we have to have that in Duke Nukem Forever.”
Is this game going to be available for Wii?
Customers who bought this also bought: Half Life 2: Episode Three, Vista with WinFS, TextMate 2.0, Daikatana and a Crunchpad
I love that Amazon lists the PC version as coming out for “Windows 7/XP.” So telling! I don’t think there’s really an analogy to make. Vista was a failure beyond comparison.
Customers who bought this also bought: Half Life 2: Episode Three, Vista with WinFS, TextMate 2.0, Daikatana and a Crunchpad
Interestingly enough, Daikatana's 3 years development time is not considered out of the ordinary for AAA games these days.