Duke Nukem Forever finally available for pre-order on Amazon | Hacker News Reader

Duke Nukem Forever finally available for pre-order on Amazon

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109 pointstswicegood66 comments

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Ha! I know someone who pre-ordered it like 8 years ago. Not falling for that this time.

Ouch!

I wonder whether this guy's pre-order will be approved :)

http://obnoxiousgamer.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/duke-nukem...

It would be in GameStop's best interests to do so.

After all, he's still on the hook for all but $10 of the purchase price. If I were GameStop I'd get a camera crew together and make this some good press for a $10 "loss".

Marketing like this doesn't get cheaper than $10.

"Marketing like this doesn't get cheaper than $10."

Except for the fact that Game Stop is stupid and evil. They actually have a policy where they won't let you open up your game in the store after you purchase it for the purpose of exchanging it if it's scratched. Then again, most commercial games these days are designed for really dumb people, so it's not all that surprising.

If corporate America had any sense, they'd spend one fiftieth of their next ad buy, send a camera crew and the product lead out to his house, and give him "the first copy" signed by the dev team to play on his brand new Duke Nukem AlienWare computer.

Sadly, finding this sort of initiative in corporate America is rather difficult... which is why folks like e.g. Airbnb eat their PR/marketing lunch.

So let's get this strait, the fact they did not refund peoples money after 8 years is now somehow bad for them? I mean it's not like preordering meant they sent the money to the publisher. Unlike Amazon where it's free and you can cancel your preorder GS just pockets the cash in exchange for your place in line.

It's a trap!

Customers who bought this also bought: Half Life 2: Episode Three, Vista with WinFS, TextMate 2.0, Daikatana and a Crunchpad

You listed six of the seven signs of the apocalypse

Interestingly enough, Daikatana's 3 years development time is not considered out of the ordinary for AAA games these days.

Except that Daikatana was never particularly revered as a triple-A game, so far as I can remember! ;-)

Wikipedia said it sold 200k units and payed for its development, so it's not the terrible failure people seem to tout it as either :)

I wonder how much DNF will have to sell to pay back its development costs?

Wired has a really good article from last year about why DNF was never finished: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_duke_nukem/

Executive summary: The first game was too successful. Failure can be, and often is, a good thing.

"Normally, game developers don’t have much cash. Like rock bands seeking a label to help pay for the cost of recording an album, game developers usually find a publisher to give them an advance in exchange for a big slice of the profits. But Broussard and Miller didn’t need to do this. 3D Realms was flush with cash. [...] Yet the truth is, Broussard’s financial freedom had cut him off from all discipline. He could delay making the tough calls, seemingly forever. One day, Broussard came in and said, ‘We could go another five years without shipping a game’ because 3D Realms still had so much money in the bank"

Another lesson to be learned is: shipping is a feature.

“George’s genius was realizing where games were going and taking it to the next level,” says Paul Schuytema, who worked for Broussard and Miller heading up the development of Prey, another 3D Realms title. “That was his sword and his Achilles’ heel. He’d rather throw himself on his sword and kill himself than have the game be bad.

Broussard simply couldn’t tolerate the idea of Duke Nukem Forever coming out with anything other than the latest and greatest technology and awe-inspiring gameplay. He didn’t just want it to be good. It had to surpass every other game that had ever existed, the same way the original Duke Nukem 3D had.

But because the technology kept getting better, Broussard was on a treadmill. He’d see a new game with a flashy graphics technique and demand the effect be incorporated into Duke Nukem Forever. “One day George started pushing for snow levels,” recalls a developer who worked on Duke Nukem Forever for several years starting in 2000. Why? “He had seen The Thing” — a new game based on the horror movie of the same name, set in the snowbound Antarctic — “and he wanted it.” The staff developed a running joke: If a new title comes out, don’t let George see it. When the influential shoot-’em-up Half-Life debuted in 1998, it opened with a famously interactive narrative sequence in which the player begins his workday in a laboratory, overhearing a coworker’s conversation that slowly sets a mood of dread. The day after Broussard played it, an employee told me, the cofounder walked into the office saying, “Oh my God, we have to have that in Duke Nukem Forever.”

Very appropriately launched on Dec 28th, the Latin version of April's fools.

I think I'll wait for retail :)

Ditto, I'm not even going to believe it when I'm holding a disc in my hand loading it into a drive. I'll believe it when I'm halfway through (what by now should be the first FPS to break the 10+ hour mark, really it should be breaking the 100+ hour mark) and it wasn't a half-complete last-ditch scam to keep the project alive and funded.

I'm serious, until that point I believe DN:F is fake. This wouldn't be the first time a retailer is hosting pre-order before the game actually has a release date set.

As long as we're having a bit of fun, here's Yahtzee's "review" of DNF, which your post reminded me of:

http://hawtymcbloggy.com/2010/09/01/zero-punctuation-viewers...

I have linked to someone embedding the video because as of this writing the Escapist magazine appears to be down. It ought to be living at http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation... .

For the record, this "review" dates from shortly after the cancellation was announced and quite a bit before the current company picked it up, so when it refers to the game being released it was being very "review"y.

They have ruined everything! Suddenly "I'll get a date when DNF comes out" lost all its meaning.

I don't know anyone who's going to actually have time to play DNF because of this.

Don't worry, we've still got "I'll get a date when Half Life 2: Episode 3 comes out"

DNF was a synonym for vaporware. I even always used DNF to explain to people what vaporware is. What now?

iPhone on Verizon.

I'd say that's not a good example, because Apple never promised that the iPhone would come to Verizon (and Verizon didn't either).

maybe they just haven't made the announcement yet ;)

I'm expecting it no later than Apple's next quarterly earnings report (mid Jan iirc).

white iphone

Much better. Thank you.

Textmate 2

http://textmate2.com

Xanadu

Maybe it's a sign you're actually going to get a date soon?

I'd actually consider paying the pre-order fee to keep it in a perpetual state of pre-order. Goes from epic vaporware to a whole new vapor-based business model.

So pumped Textmate 2 is finally coming out. I was just about to switch to vim too.

I read this and thought TextMate 2 was out for some reason :)

Funny -- there was just a thread on the Mac Ach at Ars Technica on this subject: http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=113190... , and the top post says:

So remember the Duke Nuke'em Forever jokes back in summer 2008!. It's now nearly 2011. Still not even a rumor of a beta. Will this product ever be released?

Another person said:

I really think it's sill in development. I mailed him few days ago to still encourage him to develop TM2. I had a reply from the support guy, containing “hope we can live up to your expectations"

Of course, my expectations are that Textmate 2 will never come out, so I hope they don't live up to expectations in my case. But those expectations are easy to exceed.

TM2 is a lost cause.

I'm banking on Coda 2 now!

You, sir, are a master of nuanced satire. Kudos.

I don't even play video games any more, but if it's reviewed as any good at all, then I'd be tempted to buy a copy and waste a weekend playing it.

...hmm, maybe this is how all those luxury nostalgia business models work like $200 Barbies...

This is the first video game to have a "movie" appeal. Fans of other cross-media formats, such as comic books, often will watch the movie simply because they were a fan of the series - even if the consensus is that the crossover is absolutely and completely terrible, and also hear as much from their most trusted referrals (see: Daredevil).

Because of the aging of this game and the story behind it, this sequel has taken on a similar quality - showing that maybe the thing that creates the appeal isn't the media format presented, but rather, the duration of time between one notable appearance and the next.

Watch, they'll cancel orders last minute and say thanks for helping fund the sequel, "Duke Nukem Never".

Is anyone expecting more than a mediocre game?

It is rare that I ever do that, but I wouldn't put it past anyone to retain a modicum of hope for DNF.

As long as it's offensive, we will be okay.

I played it at PAX. It will be mediocre by objective standards - the graphics are nothing to really admire at, and the gameplay is the same old FPS gameplay we've been used to for the last N years.

But the game is gut-bustingly funny, crude, and blatantly offensive in the way only Duke can. In that sense, I'm fairly confident about it.

Does it really matter? If you're a fan of a particular game genre you kind of have to accept 80-90% of games are basically a theme/skin/sound pack. At minimum it should at least bring some humor back into the FPS genre which is very lacking. We have enough serious FPS war game theme packs out there.

Certainly, there is no possibility of the game itself providing anything like the enjoyment of the no-game. I for one am disappointed.

It's just not the same. It's a game by the same name, but this isn't the DNF that we were waiting for: The possibly end-all be-all of games because it took so long to develop.

I was initially skeptical when Gearbox announced that they were releasing it (I figured they had just scrapped most of what was there and built their own game), but apparently 9 ex-3D realms employees formed their own micro-studio (Triptych) and continued development from their homes until they could muster support from Gearbox to help polish and build the console ports. So far Gearbox/2K has also done a great job of marketing so they will probably see a nice ROI for saving DNF.

So it's still developed for the PC and ported to the consoles instead of the other way around? GBX's shoddy pc port of that RPG shooter makes me wary...

Borderlands? Seems to be a solid port to me.

Well that's actually really good to hear. I have a lot of faith that Gearbox can bring the desired level of polish. With the ex-3DR employees on-board this game will probably be pretty faithful to what they had originally wanted to release. Good news!

Obviously the delays were intentional to accomplish something no other development studio ever has or ever will again.

I love that Amazon lists the PC version as coming out for “Windows 7/XP.” So telling! I don’t think there’s really an analogy to make. Vista was a failure beyond comparison.

I know this is off-topic and you'll be at -4 soon but beyond comparison? Really? I can easily think of an apt comparison: Windows ME. Though ME was much much worse than Vista.

7 IS Vista, hastily rebranded and tweaked a bit.

Hard to disagree. But it sure ain't priced like a service pack!

Together with GNU Hurd, ON ONE BLUERAY!! BAAAAAAEEEMMM!!!!

I think it would have been great if they allowed pre-orders 5 years ago too. I could have sworn I heard of this happening but perhaps not.

Try GameStop, nine years ago.

http://www.bravenewgamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/SZ9e...

Amazing - thank you!

Is this game going to be available for Wii?

Oh, I can think of wiimote minigames that won't stand very well with Nintendo :)

Shake it, baby.

Seriously, is this a joke?

if there was ever one product I would not risk "pre-ordering" ...

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