An anonymous developer has come up on the Gearbox forums to explain, in detail, his side of working on Duke Nukem Forever. Among other things, the dev states the team was unable to rein in series creator George Broussard’s ambition.
This unnamed dev was definitely part of 3DRealms, and was among those laid off from the company in 2010 (more on this later). This means he was there for thirteen of the fourteen years the game was in development.
As you can imagine, fourteen years of development history is not easy to sum up and give the full story justice. If you are not familiar with this history, I think the most salient point is that work on the game spanned several console generations. With the entry of each generation, the team kept moving work on the game to a newer engine (Quake II, then Unreal, then Doom). The game was eventually finished and published by Gearbox, shortly after 3DRealms ran out of funding.
The dev unpacks several problems with the studio, not only with mistakes in development, but with the company culture itself. The biggest problem was Broussard himself, who had too much control and not enough accountability for the project. While the devs themselves saw problems running in development, they could not tell Broussard directly, who they characterized as a ‘dove-like’, easy to get along figure. On the side, Broussard himself was too obsessed with making the game perfect to hold devs accountable for their mistakes.
Money was a thorny issue with the devs from the start. They were getting comparatively low wages for 80 hours a week, a workrate that would eventually be worth four times as much as their actual income. Many devs would leave through the years because of this.
As practical considerations of porting to consoles and switching engines reared their head, Broussard was finally compelled to finish the game. As he did so, the company culture worked against the game development, as a small feud came up between the older developers, and the new team Broussard brought in.
This anonymous dev’s side of the story ends soon after Broussard took out several loans and asked their publisher, Take-Two Interactive, for more support. On May 8, 2009, 3DRealms laid off the staff working on the game, and the company itself downsized. Duke Nukem Forever’s story took a few more turns before its eventual release to PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 between May and June of 2011.
At the end, the dev says he actually enjoyed working on the game, but because it took so much out of his and his colleague’s lives, and of course the game’s eventual failure, he definitely thinks it was not worth it.
I’ll resist the urge to get overly negative on this story. Suffice it to say Duke Nukem Forever stands out as an outlier in video game development, and if other game makers learn the proper lessons from it, no other game will be developed under similar circumstances ever again.
