I just wanted to announce that we've retrieved a lot of different Duke Nukem Forever screenshots/videos/concept art and we'll be posting them up on a separate page soon.  We also expect to see more media coming out--I think the fans deserve it.  Keep checking back, and know that the community will thrive and that Duke will remain alive no matter what.

FYI, I would wager that this photo was taken BEFORE the shut down announcement.  I know many of you are wondering why some of these guys are smiling after having lost their jobs, and hopefully now it makes a little more sense.

Edit: Joe has informed me that the photo was actually taken today around 6 PM Texas time.

One of our admins here, Lead, wrote this up:

If all the bits and pieces mentioned in various places (true or not) were put together it would go something like this:

1. George and Scott own equal parts of 3D Realms.
2. DNF taking forever to make costs tons of money.
3. Scott who is arguably the smarter businessman gets tired of this over time and doesn't want to dump his money into it anymore.
4. Scott looks to other things like Radar Group and newly launched Apogee Software LLC and leaves 3D Realms in Georges hands.
5. Scott is still technically a manager at 3D Realms but is effectively done with 3D Realms at that point.
6. Scott is now free to run companies as he sees fit without dealing with a 50% partner.
7. A year or so later George wasn't able to handle it, especially with lack of Scott's personal and financial cooperation.
8. Eventually funds begin to run low.
9. Since Scott is out, and so is money, George drives out to California to show Take 2 the game in an attempt to wow them into funding development to finish DNF.
10. Vague references were made to Take 2 possibly having (verbally) promising money, but didn't deliver.
11. When George requested the $5 million from Take 2 so DNF development could be funded.
12. Take 2 counter-offered with giving 3D Realms $30 million instead.... *IF*3D Realms sells all rights to the Duke IP. (currently Take2's only has publishing rights)
13. George\They refuse this and keep the Duke IP, instead shutting down the company and going on life support.
14. The purpose of not selling the IP is because the Duke IP still has the potential to make money, and it is their trademark. It would be like iD selling the Doom IP.
15. George is said to have previously went to iD Software and Epic in an attempt to make a deal with funding for them, but is turned down.
16. ..was also said to still have plans to contact other companies to make similar requests.
17. A company in a better position to spend $5 million, such as EA or Microsoft are seen as the most likely candidates for possibly investing in saving DNF.

Let me confirm first that 3D Realms is defunct.  This is not a marketing hoax, gimmick, or whatever else you want to call it.  3D Realms will exist now only as a legal entity between its founders, Scott Miller and George Broussard.  All employees have been let go, and we wish them the best.

That being said, former art director "Tramell Isaac" from 3D Realms has released some unofficial screenshots from the game:

  
  

Surely, you remember the last time we had a style update.  RedSplat works everyday to make the site shinier, and today he's ready to present us with his latest revision of the Duke4.net theme.  Clear your cache (Control+F5 twice) and you'll instantly notice some of the changes.  Our dynamic menu is more stylish, as is the right column of the site.  There's much more color in play, and news titles are easier to read.  And of course, as RedSplat says, the red bars on the sides of our news items mean that we are on "red alert" for DNF media.  Before you jump to any conclusions, we assure you that this is absolutely wishful thinking on our part, but if you've been following our news lately, you'll see that things MIGHT be looking up just a bit.

In the accompanied thumbnail, you'll be able to see a large picture of the website as it looked before the style revision.  We archive every graphical milestone for historical purposes, and this week's small improvement is no exception.

Enjoy the new(er) Duke4.net!

Today marks the 12th anniversary of the announcement of Duke Nukem Forever. Some games have been known to take a long time to develop, but over the years Duke Nukem Forever has become virtually synonymous with vaporware and has been the object of many jokes as well skepticism on the part of many as to whether or not it will be released at all. The development time has become so long that time passed since certain events within its development match or even surpass the entire development time of other games. For instance, September 14th of this year will mark the 5th anniversary of the announcement that 3D Realms changed the games physics engine to Meqon.

You may ask what in the world could be taking so long. There are a number of reasons for that. George Broussard, the project leader, has chimed in on that issue from time to time over the years:

Looks like no one noticed this until now, but IGN recently posted an article about DNF and Dr. Dre.  Yeah, it's a silly thing to relate the two topics, but it's gotta do something with them both being victim to delay.  There's nothing notable written except this quote that NukemDave found on there:

Well, sorta.  I'm going to assume this is a reference to the progress being made on the task database.

Plagman, the same dude that's awesome enough to lend us a file mirror for use with Duke4.org, has authored a new renderer for EDuke32. His modern OpenGL graphics engine will be available to the public soon, and will feature the following:

• Static and dynamic lights with a fully per-pixel lighting model
• Advanced parallax mapping
• Dynamic shadows
• Real-time reflections with per-pixel perturbation
• Hardware skinning for models