[hiczok]

It released june 11th 2011
Happy Bday DUKE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!



The game released 10 years ago and I am miserably still waiting for it to come out over after 20 years
Why are we still waiting for the 2001/2002 beta to come out? The final game was not even that bad... but it was not this:

[TheMuseumCurator]

I think the fascination is because while the finished product was decent for what it was, there was a time when it was really something special & somehow it lost some of that luster / original vision down the line. I'm actually working on a podcast where I break down all the stuff in the DNF Museum website year by year, but some of my speculation may be incorrect as new facts come out. I mean we honestly had no evidence the talk show / autograph for a fan sequences in the finished game had any antecedents in the 2002 build until those shots leaked the other week. The mystery of what is really all there & how it all changed from year to year is still something that keeps us interested after all this time. I was looking at the Duke Nukem Forever shortcut on my desktop & thinking "There it is, but in way? There it ISN'T. Even after all this time..."

[William Beavis]

TheMuseumCurator, on 10 June 2021 - 06:06 PM, said:

I think the fascination is because while the finished product was decent for what it was, there was a time when it was really something special & somehow it lost some of that luster / original vision down the line. I'm actually working on a podcast where I break down all the stuff in the DNF Museum website year by year, but some of my speculation may be incorrect as new facts come out. I mean we honestly had no evidence the talk show / autograph for a fan sequences in the finished game had any antecedents in the 2002 build until those shots leaked the other week. The mystery of what is really all there & how it all changed from year to year is still something that keeps us interested after all this time. I was looking at the Duke Nukem Forever shortcut on my desktop & thinking "There it is, but in way? There it ISN'T. Even after all this time..."

Is this your site: https://duke4ever.altervista.org/

[TheMuseumCurator]

No, sir. I wish I was able to say that I was the administrator of that page! I'm just a lifelong Duke fan who's spent a big portion of my years waiting on the game that never came & studying the exact reasons why that situation came to be. Just like everyone else here. My impeding podcast about Duke Forever is coming from the perspective of someone who grew up on the DOS platformers, loved Doom, loved Duke 3D, loved Quake 1. It's just my random thoughts about each piece of concept art / screenshot based on what I thought of it when it came out. How I thought it tied into the overall Duke franchise / mythos at the time. (Remember when there was such a thing?!)

[ck3D]

TheMuseumCurator, on 10 June 2021 - 06:06 PM, said:

I mean we honestly had no evidence the talk show / autograph for a fan sequences in the finished game had any antecedents in the 2002 build until those shots leaked the other week. The mystery of what is really all there & how it all changed from year to year is still something that keeps us interested after all this time. I was looking at the Duke Nukem Forever shortcut on my desktop & thinking "There it is, but in way? There it ISN'T. Even after all this time..."

That's a good observation - similar fascination to how it takes seven years for the human body to renew its entire cell stock and the idea of that seems to puzzle some people - like it's supposed to be a paradox, 'seven years ago I was the same person, and yet a completely different person!'. The religious connotations are strong, too, when people want to believe in the game they didn't get over the one that they did in fact get.

Thread is a funny coincidence because I usually don't obsess over DNF myself, and yet here I was just an hour ago rewatching all the trailers (in fact, that YouTube tab is still open). You can indeed see all the Duke 3D fiber fade a little further away with every new presented build, as the development progressively lost its way towards racing against tech and becoming a prisoner of its own original ideas. I know a lot of people prefer the look of the 2001 build but personally I was always enthusiastic about the 1998 one the most, perhaps it's the graphics, perhaps the era-flavored tech but that one always felt like the most honest extension from Duke 3D to me. So many ideas were present already - that were then exclusively polished for too long, to the point of exhaustion.

[TheMuseumCurator]

Yeah! There's an argument called "Ship of Theseus" where the Greeks preserved a famous retired warship in the harbour until the point where everything original on it had been replaced. At what point can you still say it's "the same" object or is there a line to be crossed where so much on it is different that it's become something else entirely now? In my eyes there were at least 4 different games destined to be called "Duke Nukem Forever" had they been completed. They obviously have things in common, with new pieces getting dropped & added along the way. But you're right! Things majorly changed in terms of tone, storytelling & presentation. Even between 1998 / 2001. Army Ants were gone & infected EDF were in. The 2001 trailer suggested the Octabrain & Pigs were coming back in, when the 1998 vision seemed to want an entirely new roster of aliens to fight.

[DisgustedGrunt]

TheMuseumCurator, on 12 June 2021 - 05:08 AM, said:

The 2001 trailer suggested the Octabrain & Pigs were coming back in, when the 1998 vision seemed to want an entirely new roster of aliens to fight.

Think that's when 3D Realms realized those where too iconic to not include them. Something similar happened with Half-Life 2, the earliest know version (the we know of) wasn't going to include the crowbar or the HEV suit, but they added them because they where iconic.

[Outtagum]

Happy NA Release Anniversary!

[KaijuTurtle]

I recorded this video back in June but persistent technical issues prevented me from uploading until now. It was unscripted but I tried to hit some key points. I'm sure I'm not providing any grand insight to the members of this community but I wanted to do something to commemorate the anniversary.