Since so many of you are waiting for the Duke Nukem Forever E3 video, here comes the news from Joe Siegler (thanks Cygnus X-1). Instead of the previous plan of releasing the video after 3DR gets back in Texas, the video will now be released on the first E3 day (May 17). Yes, we will be mirroring all the versions of the file (low and high quality Bink, and low and high quality Quicktime). The last movie we saw from Duke4 was when it was running on the Quake 2 engine so things should be significantly different ;D

The 3D Realms website has actually been updated with some Duke Nukem Forever news. Ok so no, the game is not done yet, and no, there are no screenshots but it's an update on the video they are working on for E3 (which will be released to the public after the expo). Besides GeorgeB describing what they have done, there's also three (one, two, three) pictures of the video being edited.

The Virtual Applications Home Page has a new release of glDuke. This is still a very basic version, which means no interaction with monsters, no console, no gravity and no collision detection. But, it's just a 70.5kb download. Thanks Ryan Stotts.

MikeD sends word of a preview of Duke4Ever which mentions a few details about the game that I'm pretty sure havent been revealed just yet. Most of the new stuff talks about vehicles and stuff that Duke will be play with. Interesting...

Planet Duke has an interview with someone at ARUSH Entertainment asking him questions about the episodic Duke Nukem game, Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project , that they are working on.

In case you weren't following yesterday's Duke4Ever Gameplay Info thread, Scott Miller and George Broussard both posted saying the info from the Gathering of Developers calendar about Duke4 is wrong.

3DR never saw/approved the calendar text and it's full of errors and conjecture (nobody really talked to us about it). Communication is all squared away now and stuff like that won't happen again.

Also Duke related is this Wired article about games being made into movies, specifically touching on the Duke Nukem movie which was picked up by Dimension Films last week (story). It has some quotes from Larry Kasanoff of Threshold and others about the Duke movie and projects such as Final Fantasy. Thanks Stomped.

"You can't just make a movie anymore in this environment, you have to make a multimedia event," said Larry Kasanoff, CEO of thethreshold.com. "You have to make your intellectual property into all the ways that people can consume that entertainment. Duke will be a movie at first, but it will also be a cartoon, a record. That's what being a producer means today."

After all this time of talking about Duke4 we really dont know a heck of a lot about the game aside from some purty screenshots that were released with PCGamer many moons ago. A recent Gathering of Developers calender though of all things reveals some of the first actual insight into what the game will play like (Thanks Eric, who I assume got it from VE)

Duke visits Lake Meade (as a parody of the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee home video) and visits a house of ill repute in the desert. At the start of the game Duke's taking it easy in Vegas; he just wants to be left alone to run a casino and get some action from time to time. Then the bad Dr. Piston (ed's note - um, Proton?) blows up Vegas including Duke's Emporium. No doubt prompting Duke to say "That really pisses me off." Duke Nukem will feature classic single player levels focused on the run, jump, shoot, curse model of past Duke games, while others will incorporate exciting new modes of gameplay, including vehicle action and more. And with those darn aliens around, you can be sure that Duke will be encountering a few surprises he's never seen before.

Even at this E3 Duke still wont be showing anything more than a video on the floor. Keep in mind that no matter how long a game takes to make or what you may think of the developers, nobody really knows if the game is good or not. Dont act like you do. :)

E3 is getting closer and I'm gonna say of all the big shows this is easily the one I've anticipated most. There is a ton of cool stuff to be shown this year. Even Duke4Ever will attempt to shed the stigma of vaporware! Here's word (Thanks VE) from George Broussard:

We will show DNF at E3 this year (barring an act of god). We'll do a video showing off tons of actual gameplay (not just scripted events), so you can all see it's a game. It's not going to be a "fluff" video and it should crush the E3 98 video in every conceivable way. We'll probably make this video available in high res format after E3. We won't be releasing any screenshots until DNF starts it's press run in magazines near release. Even then, don't expect 50 new shots, as we will keep it within reason.

Speaking of 3DR, they stole the Shack programmer! Yes Andy Hanson, the programmer who is responsible for the funk.y comment code here is by trade a 3D programmer. This new job for Andy is of course a concern around these parts. He's pretty confident that the new system around here will be finished up though in his free time.

Gamespot has learned of a new Duke Nukem game called Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project. This 3rd person action game, due to be released this fall, will take place in New York and will have Duke fighting against Dr. Proton. It will be released episodically online.

Dimension Films has announced (Thanks Eric who I assume saw it @ GameWeek) that they have scored the rights to Duke Nukem to make a movie from 3DRealms. They have also announced that the movie will be produced by Larry Kasanoff who is also responsible for making the Mortal Kombat movie which surpsingly didnt suck all that much. Keep in mind this is only an announcement of rights to the movie and not actual beginning of production. For every 50 games that have movie studios sitting on rights to making a movie, only 1 actually gets made.

In his feature film debut, Duke assumes the role of Earth's best defense against all form of alien threat; he takes on the dangerous mission of traveling into deep space to intercept an alien ship on a collision course for Earth. This suspense filled, testosterone flooded action adventure film will be PG-13, in the vein of ``The Mummy'' and ``Men in Black.''

They also included this in the PR "Generating nearly $1 billion, Duke Nukem is among the most profitable video game properties" Uh... that is like, a lot of money.

Just a minor note on DNF stuff. Broussard mentioned the latest recommended system specs for DNF along with a mention that they are working on ditching Glide and making DNF a D3D game. The specs have gone up a bit since he first mentioned them in a Shack interview many moons ago.

Word in a .plan update from George Broussard is that they have filled those positions they announced already. Here's your chance to make fun of the quality of a game you havent played because it's taking a long time. Go for it!

Wanna work on Duke4? George Broussard updated his .plan file saying 3DR is looking for two more programmers to help finish up the game. They're looking for someone in the tech and for someone in the gameplay department.

Well it's finally happened. you guys scared Wiederhold over at 3DRealms into finally taking a shower. On top of that he's got this to say which will probably be the last thing we hear from the guy for what I'm guessing is the rest of the year. Check it out:

[...] From time to time George and I have been kicking around the idea of just shutting the hell up until the game is done. This has been happening more and more often lately and astute forum regulars and trolls alike might be able to venture a guess why. Getting in the mud and arguing with the fans is a lot of fun, especially when you find a group of people who can take it as just that and don't want us to act like salesmen when we talk with them.

Well, I woke up this morning and thought "Today is the day". So I finally took a shower after 6 months. I'm sure my co-workers will appreciate this. After the shower though, I decided to just shut up until the game has "Gone Gold". Once it is out I'll be bursting with energy to talk to everyone about it, offer suggestions for mod authors on getting things to work, help fixing issues, whatever.  To make it more than just a "promise to not post on forums"... if I do post somewhere, I'll owe the entire company dinner at someplace of their choice (Kobe, whatever). [snip]

What this of course means is I can publically ridicule Charlie all I want now. hmm....

The 3D Realms website has an update about the fact that five years ago the Duke Nukem 3D demo was released. That's a pretty long time, I still remember it well..only been online since about a month before that. Transferring all those megs on my 28k8, it took forever :) Now bring us Duke4 3DR !

In The Trenches has an interesting article looking at the policy 3DRealms and (and Valve and many other developers) have been following of releasing no details on the game that they are working on. Duke4Ever. The piece talks with several other developers asking them their opinion on the policy including folks like The Romero and others. Here is Broussard's take:

We think it's the right thing to do. For us. At this time. It's very hard on fans to hear "when it's done", and we understand that. But it's much harder to be promised a release date, then miss it time and time again. That builds up people's expectations and hopes, then shatters them with delays. Ideally on our next project, we aren't even going to announce it for 6 months, and we won't show any shots unti it's 1 year away, then we will so silent until it's in beta and 3-4 months from release.

We feel the same way about hyping a game too early. We made that mistake early on with DNF and that's why we pulled back on screenshots and magazine previews. You will not see any more of that stuff until the game is essentially done.

Charlie Wiederhold over at 3DRealms has a .plan update announcing the impossible (Andy wrong!?). That Register story going out the other day leading people to believe 3DR wouldnt be allowing DNF screenshots to be posted on the net was incorrect, as was stated by Broussard earlier.

Since so many people seem to completely misunderstanding the misrepresentation of a post by Andy over at PlanetCrap (story), (We're guilty of this stuff once in a while too FYI, oops) here is a clarification by George Broussard of 3DRealms on exactly what was said

>>Do you (and your lawyers) think that there is any way a web site could post unofficial screenshots of DN4 as a part of a review and it would be legally protected as fair use?

Dunno. And you will note that we NEVER EVER said we'd try to stop sites from using shots. EVER. I just said that web sites take crappy shots in general and too many of them. It was a general discussion about the state of screenshots in the industry. Nothing more.

George Broussard

Context , Speculation , Todays Lesson

As DNF screenshots are the flavor of the day, check out the 3DR frontpage where they have posted the winners of their fake screenshot contest. Not really sure what could have inspired that though. Oh, and here are the real screenshots for comparison.

Been getting emails about this story on The Register throughout the day, where they report that during a recent PlanetCrap thread (the story on The Register was submitted by PC's Andy Smith) George Broussard from 3D Realms announced they would stop unofficial print game guides and wouldn't allow reviewers to use their own screenshots once the game is released (whenever that might be, heh). While going after unauthorized game guides isn't that strange perhaps, the quotes about the screenshots were mostly taken out of context, as an observant PlanetCrap reader wrote

Just a reminder what George actually said, for those too busy to read back:

"You can write whatever the hell you want. Go for it. Slam whatever. But I don't want you taking shots of floors or walls or something stupid and hurting the image of the game with your bad shot taking abilities... We're talking hypothetically here. We all agree that most web reviews post too many shots and usually bad shots. I don't see why they can't use the provided shots (it's been done that way for years in the past). The easiest solution is to prevent shots in the initial release. Sure you can bypass it, but most people probably wouldn't bother. And even things like HyperSnap can be prevented, if you wanna bother. Guess the question is "what do you do when web sites don't respect your wishes?". Don't know....yet."

In the Register, that came out as Broussard "announced plans" to block the use of non-authorized screenshots in web reviews. Pretty dodgy, Andy.

BruceR