[December Man]

ck3D, on 29 January 2026 - 03:05 AM, said:

Two hours from now:

I'm glad somebody in the industry remembers Duke, because Gearbox certainly doesn't.

[Mike Norvak]

Well here is a little present and the perfect excuse to revisit some of my Reduked tracks

https://noisebrec.ba...areware-version

[Ninety-Six]

ck3D, on 29 January 2026 - 03:05 AM, said:

Two hours from now:

I had no idea Tom Hall had any involvement with Duke at all, and here I learn that I guess we have him to credit for Duke's egocentricity starting in 2.

Likewise Tom also seems to be the missing piece in my understanding of 3D's development. Whether he worked on the game itself is irrelevant as it seems he was the one that got George more personally involved (I wasn't aware he wasn't from the start), and I suppose this explains the radical shift in development between Lameduke and what we got. I always held that DN3D's prototype saga was the most drastically different of all the known betas. Even Half-Life 2 wasn't as far removed from the final product as Duke 3D was.

Spoiler

Also this video was how I learned that the FPS documentary was out. After the fundraising I heard nothing more from it.

[ck3D]

Ninety-Six, on 30 January 2026 - 05:39 PM, said:

I had no idea Tom Hall had any involvement with Duke at all, and here I learn that I guess we have him to credit for Duke's egocentricity starting in 2.

Likewise Tom also seems to be the missing piece in my understanding of 3D's development. Whether he worked on the game itself is irrelevant as it seems he was the one that got George more personally involved (I wasn't aware he wasn't from the start), and I suppose this explains the radical shift in development between Lameduke and what we got. I always held that DN3D's prototype saga was the most drastically different of all the known betas. Even Half-Life 2 wasn't as far removed from the final product as Duke 3D was.

I too picked up on that part. The way it is described that early Duke 3D apparently had (paraphrasing) 'lots of levels' (but missed some kind of special sauce) also sort of corroborates my theory that a lot of the level material would have been produced super early on by Blum who truly must have gone through a phase of fascination with Build when introduced to it and/or either way was curious enough to just go and try to build literally everything - we were having that discussion on High Treason's D3D 30th Anniversary stream just last night. I think he may have started with bases, which would make sense on the timeline after DooM, that probably got repurposed into most of E2 later; and then at some point it must have been decided (by Broussard?) that cities tended to work well and so should be a prominent novelty but only if cut down to reasonable size to avoid the Downtown syndrome (L6). Hall's comment most likely just flipped the switch in Broussard's brain that perhaps now was the time to stop messing around, look at what the artists had been producing from a manager's POV and decide on what would (literally) make the game; and also a marketable one. It would make sense he would only seriously chime in about a year in or so, good entrepreneurs know that originality in production has to stem from a creative burst that is mostly free until at some point it needs to be caught and organized into a direction in order to eventually find a tangible (and hopefully financially viable) destination. Otherwise the genie just never leaves the lamp to benefit but itself and that is when creativity can become masturbatory (and logically be perceived as such all the more so in a materialistic society).

In the aforementioned stream, it also stood out how some of that later repurposal stage of E2 level material must have been rushed towards the end of the process, for instance most of the textures in Lunar Reactor look like they just were slapped there on the floors and walls that themselves obey a different aspect ratio. Some of it may be stylistic, but a lot of it sticks out the same consistent way as if the result of an automated process (i.e.. Alt C in the editor = bulk texture swap). There also are instances of 'choices' e.g.. metal beam as floor that persists as very LameDukey, and High Treason pointed out the last room of Warp Factor (IIRC) even has wood in it, through discrete use of an E3 texture (so presumably a much later one) around the Nukebutton (it is a Dukai Sushi wall tile with a red palette, to be specific, being used for narrow wall trimming; and the beta screens we have seen of E3L1 do seem to confirm specific tiles for that level came up way late; E3 textures in general probably came up way late, supported by how all of the E3 building textures are past all of the bosses at the very end of the 1.3d .art files).

[Ninety-Six]

ck3D, on 30 January 2026 - 06:06 PM, said:

good entrepreneurs know that originality in production has to stem from a creative burst that is mostly free until at some point it needs to be caught and organized into a direction in order to eventually find a tangible (and hopefully financially viable) destination. Otherwise the genie just never leaves the lamp to benefit but itself and that is when creativity can become masturbatory (and logically be perceived as such all the more so in a materialistic society).

It's deeply ironic to be describing Broussard this way.

I'm not necessarily saying it's wrong (I honestly don't know what exactly was happening in 3DR's offices during development), just that it's very very ironic.

[ck3D]

Ninety-Six, on 30 January 2026 - 08:10 PM, said:

It's deeply ironic to be describing Broussard this way.

I'm not necessarily saying it's wrong (I honestly don't know what exactly was happening in 3DR's offices during development), just that it's very very ironic.

One common extreme of that phenomenon is when, ultimately, the manager makes the logical leap that if the product is successful, then of course it is thanks to their management - and not to the value of what the artists had been constructing, oftentimes long before the manager even got involved. The treatment a lot of the people who made Duke 3D a fundamentally good game visibly got post release and success (as soon as 1.3d out of the door) may be a sign that this probably is what happened. But the goose's secret is it won't lay golden eggs if removed from its nest. Who am I kidding - it probably shouldn't even be a mystery that of course when you remove the foundation of something then you sabotage its stability.