[KaijuTurtle]

Is anyone else getting sick of Apogee/Scott constantly shilling on Twitter with reference to Duke? At first it was kind of cool, with randomly giving away Duke 3D mousepads, but it seems over the last few months it’s been more and more constant- posing questions about Duke for community engagement, Scott styling himself “creator of the king” when he autographs things, posting about the Forever leaks, going through storage and showing off boxes of new old stock Duke toys and promotional material… it’s getting tiresome.

I understand they’re trying to drum up attention for themselves to promote whatever 2D platformer they’re publishing at the moment, but it seems disingenuous when you’ve been paying attention long enough to remember Scott doing this routine when New 3D Realms was starting up. It’s not like they’ve got any control of the Duke IP, and while Gearbox clearly has no desire to do anything with the brand, I just get this skeezy feeling from it. Is anyone actually getting excited about the chance of winning a raffle draw for a sheet of paper with a 3D Realms letterhead, or a sticker parodying the ‘96 electoral campaign? Honestly I’ve come to respect Broussard’s approach of occasionally answering questions about Duke but otherwise focusing entirely on his recent freeware game jam productions.

I may be barking up the wrong tree but this was the only place I could think to get it off my chest.

[OpenMaw]

It's a blatant fucking lie for Scott to say he had anything to do with the creation of Duke.

Allen Blum and Todd Replogle created Duke. George redrew him. Scott was just a business man.

Nobody ever talks about why Apogee and id Software parted after Wolfenstein 3D. There's a reason for that.

Scott has always prided himself of screwing people. He does it all the time on facebook. His ex girlfriend has spoken out about some of his bulslhit.

It's really quite sad to find out just how many of these people are absolute douche-nozzles. The ones that seldom say anything

And with all that being said, this would at least be somewhat tolerable behavior if Apogee had any right to the Duke character.

[xMobilemux]

Even I'll admit to having some fun engaging in some the posts showing off my Duke collection when he posts stuff about Duke and it's cool to see more people with Duke collections show their stuff in turn.

I don't wanna get too involved with all the drama as I just wanted to post all about Duke with everyone else, but yeah seeing Miller take claim on everything is getting annoying and he's starting to look like another Randy or Frederic in my eyes.

I still engage in the vein hopes that I might get some Duke stuff from Miller's storage, but I don't expect to.

After all, real Duke legends like George, JSJ, Joe Siegler have already seen my Duke collection and crowned mine the best, even Miller concurred, it was satisfying to go back and forth with Joe and watching him think he had the biggest Duke collection, only to finally submit that mine was ultimately bigger.

[Lunick]

lol
https://i.imgur.com/WDh6gGA.png

https://i.imgur.com/1B10e62.png

[X-Vector]

Remember this?

https://forums.3drea...ead.php?t=37580
https://www.ign.com/...lks-radar-group
https://nofrag.com/game-industry-2-0/

Quote

Welcome to Radar Group

Is it better to create, or be exploited? When it comes to cross-media, so far, the game industry has preferred the latter – without measurable success. Why? In large measure, just because a movie is fun to watch doesn't mean it will be fun to play, and visa versa.

That was Game Industry 1.0.

No more.

No more games based on 3rd party licensed Intellectual Properties. No more sweatshop internal development. No more stale titles. Now - fresh properties. Original ideas. Exciting gaming and entertainment concepts. All expertly leveraged with our strategic partners to maximize cross-media IP value into films, TV shows novels and toys. Game Industry 2.0 has arrived.

Welcome to RADAR. Original Thinking™ at work.

Miller's always been heavy on the hubris, he just managed to play it a bit more cool than Broussard.

[Ninety-Six]

What's this about $120k?

[Dan]

OpenMaw, on 15 March 2023 - 03:17 AM, said:

It's a blatant fucking lie for Scott to say he had anything to do with the creation of Duke.

Allen Blum and Todd Replogle created Duke. George redrew him. Scott was just a business man.

Scott defined the character, he created all the levels in the first episode, and all the game's sound effects. While he didn't do everything it's false to say he had nothing to do with the creation of Duke.

[Dr.Panico]

Dan, on 16 March 2023 - 02:35 PM, said:

Scott defined the character, he created all the levels in the first episode, and all the game's sound effects. While he didn't do everything it's false to say he had nothing to do with the creation of Duke.

And he also has a writing credit alongside Todd on Duke Nukem II. So Scott was heavily involved with, at the very least, the first two games in the franchise.

[Undead Zaxxy]

I think that it's a complex situation but overall I think it's fine what he's doing.

Scott Miller was there when Duke was created, he is the "Duke 1 & 2 guy" so while he admittedly doesn't have much to do with Duke 3D and that game's version of Duke I think that as co-founder of Apogee / 3D Realms he definitely has the right to talk about Duke.

What he doesn't have the rights to is sadly the Duke himself which does make the whole thing problematic but looking at it realistically Duke is a dead franchise so I don't think it matters much who owns the IP.

As to why he's talking so much about Duke I have the strong suspicion that at the end of the day this is all just him trying to reclaim a legacy that was honestly almost fully destroyed at this point. On one hand we have Gearbox owning the Duke IP so basically the biggest part of the Apogee / 3D Realms identity. On the other hand we have a group of Danish grifters who bought a brand name back in the day and now they are impersonating 3D Realms based on that. The latter is kind of insane, for example I ran into this Linkedin page a while ago and I think it would take at least a full day to fact check this and to correct all the blatant lies that are on display here, it's pathological:
https://dk.linkedin.com/in/freschism

I think that a way to combat this is actually what Scott is doing now with the "hey I'm Scott Miller and I'm the most important man when it comes to Duke Nukem" performance. It's a way to inform people that Apogee is a thing again and that it's actually the company that handles "old" 3DR's remaining IPs while the Danish company owns absolutely nothing, not even Rise of the Triad, Blake Stone or Halloween Harry. So I think that's a respectable goal here and honestly if this ends up stopping Embracer / Saber Interactive / Slipgate Ironworks from using the 3D Realms brand then we at least get that piece of gaming history back instead of it ending like Atari's name did.

[Ninety-Six]

Undead Zaxxy, on 17 March 2023 - 01:30 AM, said:

*wall of text*

That's an interesting take on the matter. I certainly never thought about it that way. And now having done so, it just makes me depressed... Apogee/3DR collapsed so damn hard.

[DNSKILL5]

I’m getting sick of the way he keeps shitting on nu-3DRs because they “don’t have the legacy of Apogee” for the times that they talk about the history of 3DR’s, but Apogee isn’t the same Apogee either and do the same thing so it just seems hypocritical. Sure, this Apogee has people from the original company and they own some of the legacy IPs but they do not share the legend status they once had. Only people who actually played their games growing up even know what Apogee is. Nobody else cares and a penguin game isn’t going to make them care either.

So, I don’t really care if he is using the history to get clicks and attention drawn, but don’t bitch that the other guys do it too.

[Undead Zaxxy]

DNSKILL5, on 17 March 2023 - 07:23 AM, said:

Apogee isn’t the same Apogee either

That's true in that afaik the current Apogee was founded near the time when 3DR went bankrupt so it's not the same company. Yet there is a sense of continuity there along with the old Apogee IPs. And say what you will about the penguin game but that stuff is very close to what the old Apogee did with Keen and Duke 1 and 2. There's also Turbo Overkill which is a solid shooter even if it's early access, they have another FPS in development plus there is a RoTT remaster on the way at least. Looks like a pretty varied portfolio if you ask me and the games look fairly unique.

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Sure, this Apogee has people from the original company and they own some of the legacy IPs but they do not share the legend status they once had.

What is a "legend status" though? Yep, the old stuff is gone but that doesn't mean that what remains of that should be happy with a Danish company that sells its independence to a Swedish mega corporation the first chance it gets. Personally I'm just happy that since Scott started doing this I don't have to see Froderick Schreiber or whoever the heck telling people on Twitter how he made Duke Nukem and Max Payne. That just stopped the moment he realized he'll just get crap for it instead of clout.

[DNSKILL5]

@Undead Zaxxy

To answer your question.. Apogee was once a very successful publisher and developer that people held in high regards. Now they are known for legal battles and tweets. Which sounds more legendary to you?

I agree that they shouldn't be happy with the situation of having 2 companies that both attempt to get a piece of the historical pie but.. they did this to themselves in all honesty.

I enjoy the stuff that has been shown from both companies as far as historical stuff goes, but I don't think Scott should be acting the way he is when it is obvious Apogee and 3DR are both sharing this stuff for the same reasons.

[Ninety-Six]

DNSKILL5, on 17 March 2023 - 08:41 AM, said:

but I don't think Scott should be acting the way he is when it is obvious Apogee and 3DR are both sharing this stuff for the same reasons.

For whatever it's worth this is pretty on-brand for Scott. Hell I'd go so far as to say this is on the lesser end of the scale when it comes to his ego-pumping.

[Undead Zaxxy]

DNSKILL5, on 17 March 2023 - 08:41 AM, said:

I don't think Scott should be acting the way he is when it is obvious Apogee and 3DR are both sharing this stuff for the same reasons.

Their reasons might be the same but I think there's nothing wrong with chasing clout if what that's based on is at least half true and if it actually has a helpful effect on the source material (in this case: on Duke). Scott has the first one going for him because he was actually there when Duke was born (and he was also there when they managed to kill that IP). When it comes to the new 3DR on the other hand you have a group of people who had nothing to do with the company's past.

There's also the question of "is this helping Duke or not?" and that's where things are a bit more interesting. For example look at how 3D Realms handled the DNF 2001 leak: they banned everyone from their socials who even mentioned that thing, that seems incompetent for a company that wants to chase the legacy of Duke in order to eventually resurrect it. And indeed turns out it wasn't their decision but Embracer company policy. That's not helping Duke at all when really the DNF 2001 leak is the main thing that gave Duke Nukem relevance in the last couple of years. There is a modding community around that game, it will get finished and when that happens people will play an actual Duke Nukem game made by the fans and for the fans.

So what you have to remind yourself of is that if 3D Realms had its way through their corporate overlords then there won't be a DNF 2001 project in the works. Who knows, maybe if people like Scott didn't stand behind the leak and gave it more publicity then the DMCAs and the lawsuit threats would have arrived by now. I'm not saying he had an important part in "protecting" the leak but he had a positive effect on it while 3DR's actions had a negative one... so even if both parties are doing this for their own selfish reasons then at least Apogee's selfish reasons align with what benefits the Duke community.

This is just my personal opinion but in the case of the new 3DR I also find it problematic that they are using the old games as marketing material for their own stuff in a very direct way. It seems as if the goal was not resurrecting Duke and its world but rather replacing it with the Bombshell universe where the EDF is called GDF and shit like that. Apogee doesn't really do this, sure, the constant talk about Duke is there so that you'd check out their lineup of games but it's never direct marketing, they just show you a bit of member berries but there won't be a Turbo Overkill advertisement under the post, they just expect that you'll make the connection yourself. A lot less forced, a lot less aggressive.

[BoxyKingdom]

This is Scott Miller, FYI. One of my dev friends told me about this thread, and only one user made comments that were so wildly misinformed, I decided to reply. This user wrote:

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t's a blatant fucking lie for Scott to say he had anything to do with the creation of Duke.

So, it was Todd Replogle and I who came up with the Duke Nukem name. I've told how it happened many times, I came up with the Duke part of the name, and Todd suggested the last name of Nukem. We then came up with who the character was, and he was basically an 80's style fearless action hero, who always handled every situation with a smile. That's about all the detail we needed back in 1991.

For the first Duke Nukem platformer, I created all of the first episode levels -- the shareware episode -- and Todd and Allen Blum created the remaining two episodes. I also created all of the game's sound effects, and came up with a lot of the game's key ideas, like having Proton watch you through screens placed throughout the game. (BTW, I also pitched this idea to the Ion Fury team because late in development you never saw Haskell, and I told them how we did it in Duke Nukem, to make Proton a bigger part of the game rather than only seeing him when you fight him. The Ion Fury guys liked this approach which is why you now see and heaar him during many of the game's levels.)

Also for Duke Nukem 3D I came up with a LOT of the ideas in that game, but I'm not credited because as a company owner I didn't care about getting credit.

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Allen Blum and Todd Replogle created Duke. George redrew him. Scott was just a business man.

Allen played a role, for sure, in making the first Duke Nukem game, and the next two, also. Very talented developer. Yes, George touched him up a little because I asked him too. I brought the sprites to his home and told him that we wanted Duke to have a better smile and jaw line, and George, being a pretty good artist, made the changes i asked for and Duke ended up looking better.

My main role has always been on the creative side. And that's true even in Apogee today--I'm the Creative Director for all of our games and mostly spend my time guiding our games creatively, pushing them to be as innovative as possible within the budget, and contributing key ideas to every project we have, something that any of our developers will quickly confirm if you ask them. (Have you asked them? I suspect not.)

And this has been the case since the beginning in the early 90's.

[Ninety-Six]

Well, this thread just got interesting.

Kinda surprised that IF apparently didn't do that from the start, considering the engine and who made the game.

[OpenMaw]

Dan, on 16 March 2023 - 02:35 PM, said:

Scott defined the character, he created all the levels in the first episode, and all the game's sound effects. While he didn't do everything it's false to say he had nothing to do with the creation of Duke.

I'm simply going to restate the facts. Scott Miller did not create Duke Nukem.

Todd Replogle and Allen Blum did. Period.

Scott made some maps. Goody. Duke Nukem 1 was Allen and Todd's baby, and Duke Nukem 2 was Tom Hall, Allen Blum, and Todd's Baby. Scott is a tertiary player and has gone on record lately saying he consider the characterisation of Duke from Duke Nukem 3D forward to be a mistake.