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SEATTLE – Think you're excited about the return of cigar-chomping space marine Duke Nukem? You've got nothing on Randy Pitchford.
A year ago, it looked like Duke Nukem Forever was finally dead. The perennial Wired.com Vaporware Awards winner, in the works since April 1997, couldn't be completed since Dallas-based developer 3D Realms shut its doors and laid off its entire staff. Publisher Take-Two Interactive responded by suing 3D Realms parent company, Apogee Software.
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Hands On: Duke Nukem Forever Lives Again at PAX
Enter Pitchford, co-founder and president of Gearbox Software, another Dallas videogame company. As an alumnus of 3D Realms, he wanted nothing more than to see the over-the-top shooter starring the misogynist Duke finally come to fruition. And his studio's slick hybrid game Borderlands was a feather in Take-Two's cap.
"I didn't want the dream to die," Pitchford says. So he bought the rights to Duke for an undisclosed amount, then proposed to the publisher that the lawsuits be dropped and Gearbox be allowed to finish the game.
Pitchford appears to have succeeded. At videogame convention Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle last weekend, 2K Games and Gearbox took the wraps off a resurrected Duke Nukem Forever, with Pitchford personally pitching the game to a group of incredulous gamers every half-hour.
In a tucked-away section of the Duke booth Saturday afternoon, Pitchford answered Wired.com's burning questions about the game that almost never was.
Wired.com: What happened between the closure of 3D Realms and today?
Randy Pitchford: Well, the story goes back further than that. What a lot of people don't know is that I got started as a professional gamemaker when I moved out to Texas to join George Broussard and Scott Miller and Allen Blum who created Duke Nukem, to join those guys and become part of the Duke Nukem 3D. I owe my career to Duke.
We were on the outside like everyone else, watching Duke as fans, not as developers. Wired gave Duke Nukem Forever the first Vaporware Award, and then the next year it won No. 1 vaporware again, and then again and again until Wired decided, you know what? Duke Nukem is just going to get the lifetime achievement award for vaporware. And that was like five years ago. So it's become legendary.
And Duke Nukem, I think he is the most iconic videogame character in the industry. I think Lara Croft is the female and Duke Nukem is the male. Between them, they're the most iconic figures in videogames.
So all of us on the outside went through the full range of emotions: "Sweet, we want the sequel!" "Man, it's taking them a while." "Man, that trailer looks awesome, I'm totally ready!" "Seriously, guys, what's wrong?" And we'd been through this loop so many times. And then we all got the bad news last year.
The story was, 3D Realms was shutting down, closing the doors. The rumor was the development team was laid off. The story was there were lawsuits – drama, drama, drama.
The story was that the Duke was dead and the dream was over. And this thing that so many of us were still wishing was going to find a way to break through this vaporware curse, it was over.
And here we are today now, playing the game. So what happened between those things, that's your question. The reality is, that day when everybody lost their jobs, there were some people, Allen Blum being one of them, the core of what Duke is all about, they couldn't let the dream die. A lot of the newer guys, they scattered to the winds, they all got jobs in the industry. But Allen and a handful of guys couldn't let the dream die. Besides Duke, they didn't even know what else to do.
And so they started working out of their houses, just trying to keep the dream alive. George and Scott did the best they could to support them and help them. George, he's been with this the whole time, this has been a labor of love and also it's consumed him, to make Duke Nukem Forever the best game it could possibly be.
When I heard that news, I didn't want to see the Duke die.For my part, when I heard that news, I didn't want to see the Duke die. I called up George, and he said to me, "This is the worst day of my life." I found out about Allen and those guys keeping it going. And I knew that my studio could be in a position to help, for a couple reasons.
First of all, I feel like I owe my career to Duke, and I'm not alone. A lot of the guys at Gearbox had worked on Duke Nukem 3D, and a lot of the guys worked on Duke Nukem Forever. We felt like Duke was a part of us, too. And we were in a position where we knew that we could help. And I believed that George and Scott could trust me, because I knew that they knew that I knew what the brand was all about.
Take-Two, because we were working on Borderlands together, they could trust us. We were in this weird, unique position where we could help everybody come together in Duke's time of need.
It was risky. I had to put myself in the middle of it, I had to put my studio in the middle of it, and we had to take a bet.
We had to spend money, we had to put resources on things. We had to take a big risk.
It's funny, they say you should always bet on Duke, and we did. And it paid off. We helped the lawsuit go away and settled that for everyone.
Wired.com: Take-Two was trying to get the rights to the underlying game code?
Pitchford: Take-Two wanted the game to get to customers. Take-Two had the publishing rights, and they wanted to publish a game.
I can't speak on behalf of Take-Two, but the moment that bad news happened, if I'm Take-Two, I'm thinking, "Shit! That thing that I want to have happen, that's broken now. I have to intervene, I can't fix this."
Wired.com: But this was not them coming to you saying, "We need somebody to finish this game."
Pitchford: No, I worked this out with George and Scott, and I bought the brand. I bought Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem Forever, and they gave it to me because they trusted that we would do the right thing with it. And I started funding the guys like Allen, and brought them in. About a third of the Duke Nukem Forever team, including what I consider the full core.
These guys went to war together. They've banded together, they are called Triptych [Games], and they're on our 10th floor.
Their world got shattered, and the best thing that I could do was fund them, show them the support, help them and give them the opportunity to play the role they must play in seeing this through.
You're going to become Duke Nukem and you're going to save the motherfuckin' world! But you also want to get online and beat up your friends and shoot each other and step on each other, live the full fantasy with today's modern gameplay. So there was a big investment to make there, too.
Wired.com: How much of the game was done when you got it?
Pitchford: It's impossible to talk in those terms, but I'll tell you this: There were a lot of brilliant things. A lot of things are there exactly the way they were. A lot of things have been improved. But the spirit and the plan, this is Duke Nukem Forever the way it was supposed to happen. This is the real deal.
So once I got all the pieces in place, I was able to go to Christoph Hartmann, the president of 2K Games, and I brought it to him and said, "Here's what I've done, Christoph. And I think I've put it together so that we can make this happen."
And we talked for about three hours, and it was a great meeting because he could have done a lot of things but he said, "Randy, I'm behind you. Let's make this happen." And Take-Two and 2K are now behind us in a huge way.
This is what they've always wanted. That enabled everybody to settle their differences, for us to help get this lawsuit out of the way. And Take-Two agreed that once they had what they wanted, which was that the game was going to happen, that they didn't need to have that lawsuit. And 3D Realms certainly didn't, whatever countersuits they did, they didn't want to create noise.
So everybody just made that go away. And we were able to focus on what mattered, which was making the game great.
So we all went in the tank, and we did that for a long time and we didn't say a thing. So why do that now? This is a game you can't make promises about. Imagine if in 2009, I'd said, "We've sorted it all out, we're going to get restarted again and you can trust us, it's all going to work out." It's like, "We've heard that story before. Vaporware of the year again, doot dee doo." People aren't going to trust me on this. They're certainly not going to trust George.
They're not even going to trust you. If you, with all the credibility of Wired, said, "I played this," they'll say, "I'll believe it when I see it."
Wired.com: That's exactly what they said.
Pitchford: Because that is the reality of this. It doesn't matter how much credibility you have – we've all been jerked around too much. So what we decided was, we can't launch the game without telling people because it requires worldwide coordination with retailers.
But we had to do something that gets it past this hurdle of believing. So we decided, "Let's bring the show to PAX, because PAX is a show for gamers. We don't even announce that we're going to be here. We just show up, bring the game and let people play it."
That morning, 2K told the retailers for the first time. And people were calling the retailers saying, "I want to pre-order it!" And they were laughing at them, saying it wasn't real.
Wired.com: I wonder if there are still people with their original Duke Nukem pre-orders.
Pitchford: There are. And we've got to find a way to take care of those guys. We've all been through this drama, we all feel like we've been jerked around. But we all want a good ending to this story. We all need Duke to be triumphant. We need him to pull through. He can't just fizzle away and disappear.
Wired.com: Has the vision changed at all with Gearbox getting involved?
Pitchford: The vision is what it was meant to be. My goal is not to try to twist Duke Nukem, not try to change it and make it something different. Our whole purpose is to help it live and be what it's supposed to be.
Wired.com: But it is your name on the box now.
Pitchford: That's true. Ultimately, I'll be accountable. But I am so confident. The hype is wild because of the drama and legend of Duke Nukem. I don't really want to talk talk, but I play it. It delivers for me. I love it.
Wired.com: On what level does it deliver for you? What's it delivering?
Pitchford: Duke Nukem, it's his world. He is the most important guy in it. He saved the world from this alien invasion, he saved our chicks.
And in his world, that makes perfect sense. When we play, we get to become this guy.
When we play, every moment we're entertained, we're surprised, we laugh. We have challenges and we overcome those challenges as Duke.
And each moment, if we can't wait to see what happens next, then it's working. And it does, it delivers on that level.
You don't really want to talk about Duke in terms of, how many levels are there, how many guns does it have, how many monsters.... It's got everything it needs in terms of that, but it's always been about the experience.
I really shouldn't even talk about it because at this point we just need people to play it for themselves.
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