Duke Nukem Forever

The last serious bit of information came out of the studio in 2002, and concerned another, final, change in engine technology. Dropping almost every component of the Unreal engine, 3D Realms claimed to have rewritten 95 per cent of the code, crafting what was essentially a brand new engine from scratch. Then we heard nothing for nearly five years.

Every now and then, either Miller or Broussard would pop up to give an entirely content-free interview, or answer questions on a forum, which always seemed to suggest that the game was in the latter stages of development and just needed a quick polish before it would be ready to launch. So starved of information were we that even news about licensing a new physics engine seemed exciting, if only because it proved that the corpse still had a pulse.

Then, suddenly, in December 2007, a trailer! Heavens above, a trailer, an actual trailer!

Except... Well. It was actually just a long circling shot of an oddly proportioned Duke (seriously - he had a huge body and a tiny, tiny head) pumping some iron, with a couple of split-second clips of famous monsters from the series interspersed. They looked pretty decent, but unlike the 2001 E3 trailer, it's clear this wasn't gameplay. It's a teaser, not a trailer, and teasers generally don't imply the game is on the home stretch.

The past year and a half, since that teaser appeared, has gone roughly the same as the previous five years. We've had a tiny bit of camcorder footage on Jason Hall's online TV show, which showed a small chunk of a level and a handful of enemies and weapons - vastly more up to date than the 2001 footage, but literally only a few seconds long and showing little of how the game actually works. Various statements, mostly from Broussard, have continued to point at an imminent release - just like they have since 2002. There were a couple of screenshots hidden in the Xbox Live Arcade version of DN3D. Little seems to have changed at 3D Realms.

Until today. 12 years after the official announcement, perhaps as many as 14 years after Duke Nukem Forever commenced development, today's news is that 3D Realms is shutting its doors. As I write this, it's unconfirmed - but the silence from the company's usually vocal bosses is deafening.

So what could have killed 3D Realms? The studio ran on two commodities - money and patience. It could have run out of either of those things. However, despite online scuttlebutt, the fact is that long-suffering publisher Take Two, which ended up with the rights to Duke Nukem after taking over Gathering of Developers in 2001, couldn't have killed the project. DNF has always been directly funded from within 3D Realms, and publisher input seems to have been minimal, perhaps even non-existent - Take Two's job would simply be to take the finished game and put it on shelves. If 3D Realms has gone down, and DNF with it, then it's a decision which has been taken by Broussard and Miller, not by Take Two.

Even after all the jokes - Duke Nukem Forever and Ever and Ever and Ever, Did Not Finish, and a million other examples (my favourite is this huge list of things which have happened since DNF was announced), I never quite believed that Duke Nukem Forever simply wouldn't appear. Yet, even for those of us who remember Duke Nukem 3D fondly, it's hard to escape the fact that its strippers, dreadful one-liners and oh-so subversive depiction of the police as actual pigs seemed a hell of a lot more entertaining when we were teenagers, although others at Eurogamer would definitely beg to differ.

More importantly, if you're much younger than 25 or so, you probably don't remember Duke Nukem at all. Once, DNF could have sold itself on the strength of the brand - now it would face an uphill struggle to convince a whole new generation that this slightly twee self-parodying action hero is actually worth a second glance.