I wonder if that 20-30 million was in addition to other funds. In any case it's a lot of cash. Got to admire his commitment to quality. At the same time though, you gotta wonder what the heck was going on. Seems to me that after couple of years someone would have asked "what's going wrong here? This should have been finished. What could we do to get this on track?" followed up by a working sollution and a bit more of development time. Very few games have been in development for even half this time, most of which had small development teams or had a mountian of a task ahead of them (like the polygon perfect replicas of all the cars, all the tracks, and all the other stuff they had to do to recreate the most realistic experience they could for the new Grand Turismo). I'm looking forward to The Duke's next romp, just baffled as to why it wasn't sooner.
Ex-3D Realms Head Lost "$20-30 Million" on Duke Nukem Forever
- Thread starter Andy Chalk
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The only explanation I can think of is 20 million dollars worth of fancy TVs to line the walls, floors and ceilings, while they sat around staring at a picture of Duke trying to come up with an idea while eating 12 course lobster dishes every day.
in responce to the "What were they doing for 15 years?" questions, they had a hand in the Max payne series and the excellent Prey (and that took 10 years). Still dnf has literally been a black hole for cash. I really hope DNF shines through despite not being a fan of the series and like many others i'd like to see how much of the game will be 3d realms Vs gearbox.
"He was committed to Duke to the point of insanity..."
Insanity's as good a word as any to describe it. And don't forget that 20-30 million was just what this guy lost PERSONALLY, it doesn't include all of the other money they burned through in the process.
Insanity's as good a word as any to describe it. And don't forget that 20-30 million was just what this guy lost PERSONALLY, it doesn't include all of the other money they burned through in the process.
I admire his dedication, but not his wasteful spending.
The late 90s inspired more than one extremely ambitious company to create an industry boob.
*cough Daikatana cough*
The late 90s inspired more than one extremely ambitious company to create an industry boob.
*cough Daikatana cough*
Even though I was never really a Duke fan--I know--I'm horrible. But its sad to read about any game receiving this amount of money, time, and dedication and never even getting to see the light of day.
Rest in peace duke, with your $30 million coffin.
Rest in peace duke, with your $30 million coffin.
Wow. Just wow. The amount of ignorance and lack of understanding flowing around these comments is astounding.
Come on now, think it through, break it down, imagine you are playing a game and that game is like a Sim City or whatever, where your objective is to run a game software development business that releases your ideal game. Ok, first off, you are a extremely wealthy private citizen, so you don't have to go begging your budget from a Publisher but you do need to have a market for your product, so you strike a deal with them to be the people who put it in the brick N mortar retail space. Then you buy/rent office space, perhaps just buy the property and have the building constructed to your own specific needs and wants. You are now paying all the utilities, property taxes, and maintenance of this building and property, congrats. Now you fill it with equipment, software and skilled people - that is in order of cost. Software will have upfront and long term licensing costs, its like a subscription fee for WOW after you bought the box off a retail shelf, and then your biggest cost is going to be salaries for those skilled people, especially if you want to be competitive against what other places are offering so you have the best and keep them. That means people of all different kinds. Now pay that for 12 years mostly from your own pocket because you are just that rich because people love games, especially your last ones back in the day. Do the math, 20 to 30 million divided by 12 years averages out to approximately 2 million per year of George Broussard's own bank account. While hat man certainly paid a steep price of his own sweat and treasure to realize his obsessive gaming dream, 1.8 to 2.5 million USD a year for all those costs added up is actually relatively cheap when compared to the costs others in our world incur keeping their businesses (properties and people) running.
And I am willing to bet a significant portion of the assets that make up the game Gearbox Software under Randy Pitchford say they will be shipping is stuff developed by 3D Realms under George Broussard since they hired on people who worked under him. Ugh, Duke isn't dead yet.
There is certainly a story there though and probably a lesson or two for others who want to one day release their ideal gaming experience as game developers. I hope there is a documentary or something, I know I would purchase a viewing of that, in say DVD form.
Come on now, think it through, break it down, imagine you are playing a game and that game is like a Sim City or whatever, where your objective is to run a game software development business that releases your ideal game. Ok, first off, you are a extremely wealthy private citizen, so you don't have to go begging your budget from a Publisher but you do need to have a market for your product, so you strike a deal with them to be the people who put it in the brick N mortar retail space. Then you buy/rent office space, perhaps just buy the property and have the building constructed to your own specific needs and wants. You are now paying all the utilities, property taxes, and maintenance of this building and property, congrats. Now you fill it with equipment, software and skilled people - that is in order of cost. Software will have upfront and long term licensing costs, its like a subscription fee for WOW after you bought the box off a retail shelf, and then your biggest cost is going to be salaries for those skilled people, especially if you want to be competitive against what other places are offering so you have the best and keep them. That means people of all different kinds. Now pay that for 12 years mostly from your own pocket because you are just that rich because people love games, especially your last ones back in the day. Do the math, 20 to 30 million divided by 12 years averages out to approximately 2 million per year of George Broussard's own bank account. While hat man certainly paid a steep price of his own sweat and treasure to realize his obsessive gaming dream, 1.8 to 2.5 million USD a year for all those costs added up is actually relatively cheap when compared to the costs others in our world incur keeping their businesses (properties and people) running.
And I am willing to bet a significant portion of the assets that make up the game Gearbox Software under Randy Pitchford say they will be shipping is stuff developed by 3D Realms under George Broussard since they hired on people who worked under him. Ugh, Duke isn't dead yet.
There is certainly a story there though and probably a lesson or two for others who want to one day release their ideal gaming experience as game developers. I hope there is a documentary or something, I know I would purchase a viewing of that, in say DVD form.
My guess for what happened was in the beginning they hired their design team and started making the back end, graphics physics all that jazz, then they hired the writers.
Then, as they we're trying to hammer out a good the story and gameplay mechanics, there we're several really good advances in graphics, storage, and processing power that made a lot of things possible and simultaneously made their current back end outdated and completely worthless.
So rather than wait for all the story, and gameplay, to be story boarded and thought out they told their developers to upgrade their engine. Which inevitably meant several completely new engines over the coarse of 12 years. As well as remaking with better graphics everything they may have already finished.
Let's remember, 12 years ago the PS2 was just announced by Sony as in development and wasn't released in japan until the end of 1999. Computer processors where around 600Mhz speeds and windows 97 was the best Operating System. Jump forward to today and new games demand at least a 2Ghz dual core to run at full specs. Hell my iPod has a 1Ghz processor.
I see this as a classic example of hammer out what you want to do completely then hire a full team to do it, don't just pay people to sit on their ass redoing the same thing over and over while you decide what constitutes a good game. Look at Halo, I guarantee you 90% of the story was done before bungie ever started putting that first game together.
Or, have your developers work on several projects at once so you can make multiple games off of the same back end while generating revenue, reputation, and the design of your opus.
To sum it up I don't feel sorry for the dolt that spent 30 mil wasting time.
Then, as they we're trying to hammer out a good the story and gameplay mechanics, there we're several really good advances in graphics, storage, and processing power that made a lot of things possible and simultaneously made their current back end outdated and completely worthless.
So rather than wait for all the story, and gameplay, to be story boarded and thought out they told their developers to upgrade their engine. Which inevitably meant several completely new engines over the coarse of 12 years. As well as remaking with better graphics everything they may have already finished.
Let's remember, 12 years ago the PS2 was just announced by Sony as in development and wasn't released in japan until the end of 1999. Computer processors where around 600Mhz speeds and windows 97 was the best Operating System. Jump forward to today and new games demand at least a 2Ghz dual core to run at full specs. Hell my iPod has a 1Ghz processor.
I see this as a classic example of hammer out what you want to do completely then hire a full team to do it, don't just pay people to sit on their ass redoing the same thing over and over while you decide what constitutes a good game. Look at Halo, I guarantee you 90% of the story was done before bungie ever started putting that first game together.
Or, have your developers work on several projects at once so you can make multiple games off of the same back end while generating revenue, reputation, and the design of your opus.
To sum it up I don't feel sorry for the dolt that spent 30 mil wasting time.
I hope nobody expects me to feel sorry for George Broussard. Clearly he sucks at his job, sinking 20-30 million dollars into one damn game but not being able to get a product out the door? What kind of company are you running there, George? Maybe it's time to get out of the way and let somebody who knows what the fuck they're doing take over, because you clearly can't get your studio to get a game out.
Meanwhile all the other game companies around me who get their games out in a timely manner seem to be doing a lot better than me, and I become the laughing stock among all of us. Seems about right, yeah?
Windows 98, there was no Windows 97newwiseman said:
I think if I was playing this Sim City styled game, and I didn't get this game out that I was supposed to be making after 12 years, there would surely be some kind of game over screen in there somewhere. Clearly the UFO would have come in and fucked up my building, or the flood would have drowned all my employees or something like that, because clearly I have failed on a massive level.CanadianWolverine said:
Meanwhile all the other game companies around me who get their games out in a timely manner seem to be doing a lot better than me, and I become the laughing stock among all of us. Seems about right, yeah?
win97 (aka windows 95 orc2, windows memphsis) was renamed to 98 because it came out late, a few manufactures released machines that had the window 97 digital branding, like my horrible old Compaq desktop. I love how people still get uppity about that, it borders religious fanaticism. Just know win97 is to win98 as win7Rc is to win7 they were identical except for the branding.mjc0961 said:Windows 98, there was no Windows 97newwiseman said:
I figured he just pulled a Chinese Democracy. He wanted that game to be perfect. He wanted to blow people away not only graphically, but also with gameplay and interactivity. And he was attempting to do this with licensed game engines, which meant he was graphically behind the curve from the start.
They started off with a modified Quake 2 engine, then they saw Unreal and switched to their engine. Then Unreal Tournament came out and they found their game wanting, so they incorporated UT's code into their engine. And it just kept sprawling from there. Lord knows how many times they've changed or almost completely rewrote their engine code since I stopped paying attention.
They say that movies aren't so much finished as they are abandoned. I think George Broussard found himself in a situation where he had the money and power not to abandon his game... and that was his fatal flaw. Instead of saying, "this is good enough," he kept raising the bar and thousands of hours of work would end up being tossed out because it wasn't perfect. And at some point, they must have known that the game would have to be the best selling game of all time to even break even, so this attitude ended up being irresponsible to the extreme.
They started off with a modified Quake 2 engine, then they saw Unreal and switched to their engine. Then Unreal Tournament came out and they found their game wanting, so they incorporated UT's code into their engine. And it just kept sprawling from there. Lord knows how many times they've changed or almost completely rewrote their engine code since I stopped paying attention.
They say that movies aren't so much finished as they are abandoned. I think George Broussard found himself in a situation where he had the money and power not to abandon his game... and that was his fatal flaw. Instead of saying, "this is good enough," he kept raising the bar and thousands of hours of work would end up being tossed out because it wasn't perfect. And at some point, they must have known that the game would have to be the best selling game of all time to even break even, so this attitude ended up being irresponsible to the extreme.
Yeah, that sounds about right. And 3D Realms did close down, so there we go, the game over to that particular business ... sim. IIRC, Sim City had a game over if you ran the city too far into debt, so yeah. Hehe, George Broussard, business "noob", ambitions too big for even his ctrl+x weaknesspays bank account.mjc0961 said:
Good thing Randy Pitchford has demonstrated the ability to ship games with far more frequency then, eh? Oh well, here's to continuing to wait till DNF comes out on Steam/Impulse...