Now that it’s effectively a dead project, Wired has an excellent article on the death of Duke Nukem Forever. It’s a very worthwhile read if you have any interest in technology, business, gaming, or just succeeding in anything. Among the takeaways:

• Having seemingly unlimited money can be a curse more than a blessing. Being on a budget forces discipline that’s necessary regardless of budget.
• Always have milestones and deadlines.
• Always have an end-game.
• Once you pick your platform, stick with it until you release a product unless it’s impossible to do so.
• Check your ego.

I suspect at the end it’s now come down to an IP grab and they are really just trying to get the name, which is likely worth more than all the years of software development in the project. That however doesn’t take away from how poorly managed things were.

Web Development has a notable difference in that it never really “ships”. So there’s no end-game unless your handing off the project/code. It’s an iterative process. That however still leaves milestones that need to be met.

Hopefully someone will salvage what’s left and release the game. However that would only be a good thing if its done right. To often these situations end up with a half-baked half-salvaged Frankenstein of a product.

Apparently someone did some analysis on the series and correctly concluded that the gravity physics are totally not realistic (shocking). The real nuggets are that he can jump 5 times his body height and should be unconscious on the way down since his falls achieve 9.31 g, which should render a human unconscious without a G-Suit. Maybe those are special overalls after all.

Science!

Here’s Super Mario brothers rewritten in JavaScript. It’s remarkably well done, even the physics closely match that of the original game. The only thing I noticed was a slight lag in Firefox 3.0.5 which I suspect might be due to the speed of the events rather than the actual game.

There have been several attempts to port the classic game to the web including this one which is fairly complete for 14kB of JavaScript and uses <canvas/>, though I think the one above is more like the original game.

It’s essentially SimCity 2000 + a few things. If you liked 2000, it’s a pretty safe bet the iPhone version won’t be a let down. You can of course save your game and keep it going for months since this isn’t the typical 5 minute iPhone game.

Controls on the iPhone work surprisingly well. My biggest gripe regarding controls is that when you place an object on the grid you can move it around before committing (this is necessary since there’s no hover on a touch display like there is with a mouse). I don’t mind the committing, but when moving an item off the view it doesn’t autoscroll. This makes moving an item further over, or simply zooming out a little tedious. My other gripe is that some things like adding a pumping station require too many clicks. Perhaps remembering the last selected item in that menu would cut down on the number of clicks. None of these are deal breakers, but places where some polish could be done.

Graphics are very good. To get around the performance problems of scrolling with a large city whenever you scroll it shows the colored grid rather than rendered buildings. This works well. I did notice that with the Earthquake disaster on a large city, things got choppy and it hung for a second. Not terrible, but perhaps something they will address at a later date. Some of the options panels can also be a bit slow to load. Loading saved cities is the most sluggish part of the game. I hope they can improve on some of the remaining performance stuff in a future release.

The game is very complete, though I miss the SimCity 2000 ability to raise/lower terrain. It is clearly something I can get addicted to. Graphs, map overlays are all there to assist you. I was a little surprised you can’t connect to a neighboring town though.

Since I promised some people screenshots, here they are:

Screenshots

Splash Screen

Main Menu

Loading

Cityscape

Suburbs

Bridges

Tornado

Fire

Toxic Cloud

Graphs

I still question Second Life… Where are the ugly people? Where are the obese that dominate first life? Why do I have to see overweight people in belly shirts walking around in the summer while in Second Life this problem isn’t there? Serious false advertising for real life. No wonder people get addicted.

But I digress… new Apple Store!!!

The following things have happened since Duke Nukem Forever was announced…

Popular Video Game Series Releases

Final Fantasy:

• Main Series
  • Final Fantasy VII
  • Final Fantasy VIII
  • Final Fantasy IX
  • Final Fantasy X
    • Final Fantasy X-2
  • Final Fantasy XI
  • Final Fantasy XII
• Cell Phone Games
  • Before Crisis: Final Fantasy
  • Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII
  • Dirge of Cerberus: Lost Episode
• Tactics Series
  • Final Fantasy Tactics
  • Final Fantasy Tactice Advance
• Crystal Chronicles Series
  • Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles
  • Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates
  • Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearer
• Remakes
  • Final Fantasy Collection
  • Final Fantasy Anthology
  • Final Fantasy Chronicles
  • Final Fantasy Origins
  • Final Fantasy I & 2: Dawn of Souls
  • Final Fantasy III DS
• Games Featuring Final Fantasy Characters
  • Ehrgeiz
  • Kingtom Hearts
  • Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories
  • Kingdom Hearts II
• Movies, Anime Series & Concerts
  • Final Fantasy: The Sprits Within
  • Final Fantasy: Unlimited, Entire Series
  • Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children
  • Final Fantasy: Dear Friends, Entire World Tour

Grand Theft Auto:

• Grand Theft Auto
  • Grand Theft Auto, Gameboy Color Port
• Grand Theft Auto
• Grand Theft Auto: London 1969
• Grand Theft Auto: London 1961
• Grand Theft Auto 2
• Grand Theft Auto III
• Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
• Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
• Grand Theft Auto Advance
• Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories
  • Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, PS2 Port
• Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories
• Grand Theft Auto IV

The Legend of Zelda:

• Ocarina of Time
• Majora’s Mask
• Oracle of Ages
• Oracle of Seasons
• The Wind Waker
• Four Swords Adventures
• The Minish Cap
• Six remakes of previous Zelda titles for the Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance and Gamecube
  • Link’s Awakening DX, Gameboy Color
  • A Link to the Past, Gameboy Advance
  • Ocarina of Time, Gamecube
  • The Zelda Collector Edition, Gamecube
  • Classic NES Series: The Legend of Zelda, Gameboy Advance
  • Classic NES Series: Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, Gameboy Advance
• Phantom Hourglass
• Twilight Princess

Other Popular Game Series:

• Over 75 games based in the MegaMan universe, and 12 games featuring MegaMan universe character cameos.
• Over 50 games based in the Star Wars universe.
• Mario has appeared in 58 different video games.
• Every Massive Multiplayer Online game and expansion with the exception of Meridian 59.
• Every Dance Dance Revolution and Bemani rhythm game
• Every Pokemon game released outside of Japan.
• Every Unreal, every Unreal Tournament, and every game that has used any of the Unreal engines.
• Quake 2, 3, 4, and countless games that have used their engines.
• Every Tony Hawk and extreme sport spin-off game.
• Daikatana began development 10 days before Duke Nukem Forever- Unfortunately no one was made John Romero’s bitch
  when it hit retail shelves on May 23rd, 2000.
• 3DRealms and Remedy bring Max Payne and its sequel from concepts to finished games, porting both to Xbox and PS2.

Video Game Systems:

• Microsoft XBOX
• Microsoft XBOX 360
• Nintendo GameCube
• Nintendo Gameboy Color
• Gameboy Advance
  • Gameboy Advance SP
  • Gameboy Micro
• Nintendo DS
  • Nintendo DS Lite
• Sega Dreamcast
• Sony Playstation 2
  • Sony Slim Playstation 2
• Sony PSP

• Over 4500 games were released for the above video game systems in the United States.
• Over 350,000,000 consoles and handhelds were sold worldwide.

Fun Facts

Computers & Internet:

• In 1997, the fastest consumer internet connection was a 33.6 kbps modem.
  On average, consumer internet connections are 300 times faster today.
• When Duke Nukem Forever was announced, the fastest processor available to consumers was a 233Mhz Pentium. Since then the clock speed of consumer
  processors has increased over 16 times (32 times counting dual cores), and the fabrication process has decreased from 250nm to 65nm.
• In October of 2001, Apple announced the iPod and Slashdot dismissed it as an immediate failure. Since then there have been 5 generations of iPods, as well as the
  iPod Mini, iPod Shuffle, and iPod Nano with 42 million iPods sold worldwide as of 1/06.
• Steve Jobs was still running NeXT when Duke Nukem Forever was announced.
• Every peer to peer file sharing program including Napster was developed.
• In April of 1997, Google, eBay, and the term “weblog” didn’t exist.
• Linux gained at least 10 times the popularity it had while its kernel tripled in size.
• Mac OS switched to UNIX and became the most highly regarded general purpose operating system on the market
  among the computing press.
• Microsoft released 5 consumer-oriented
  versions of Windows and might release Vista before Duke Nukem Forever hits shelves.
• Netscape Navigator 4 was released, Microsoft Internet Explorer destroyed it.
  Netscape 6 released on an entirely different rendering platform, Netscape dies, Mozilla foundation rises.
  Open-source Mozilla browsers become popular and force Microsoft to start working on new version of Internet Explorer.

Disasters:

• There have been 125 hurricanes. 73 in the Atlantic, 52 in the Pacific.
• There have been over 20 death-toll producing tornado outbreaks in the United States.
• Over 50 major earthquakes have shaken the world.

Economy:

• Adjusted for inflation, the average price of gas in the United States has doubled.
• The Euro was introduced as a new European currency.

Movies that were filmed, released in theatres, and have made it to DVD:

• All three Star Wars prequels.
• The entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, with extended editions.
• Every Pixar movie aside from Toy Story.
• Three (possibly four) James Bond films.

Pop Culture:

• Britney Spears’ entire musical career as a pop star has taken place during Duke Nukem Forever’s development.
• Theater box office totals since the announcement are over $2.62 billion.
• Colin Farrell’s entire movie career has also taken place during development.
• The concept of Bullet Time has been developed, pioneered, and completely run in to the ground.

Science & Technology:

• The Voyager 1 spacecraft has travelled 8.8 billion miles from Earth.
• The two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity were proposed, authorized,
  announced, designed, launched and successfully landed upon Mars where they
  have been exploring the surface for over 2.5 years.
• NASA’s Deep Impact program also went full circle.
• The International Space Station was assembled and has been orbiting Earth for over 8 years.
• NASA has launched 30 manned space shuttle missions, Russia has launched 17.
• The Airbus A380 “Super Jumbo” plane was designed, built, tested, and delivered to airlines.
• Tier One developed, built, tested, and launched SpaceShipOne- winning the Ansari X-Prize
  for being the first non-government organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks.
• In 1997 there were only 50 million US cell phone subscribers in the United States. Today there are more than 200 million,
  which amounts to over 60% of the population of the USA.

Sports

• Since the announcement of Duke Nukem Forever, the single season home run record has been broken. Twice.

United States Politics:

• 40 new members have been elected to the Senate.
• The national debt has increased by over 3 trillion dollars.
• The national minimum wage has remained $5.15.
• Bill Clinton finished his presidential term, George W. Bush was elected and re-elected.

World Events:

• 4 nations have acquired nuclear weapons technology.
• 19 wars have begun.
• 5 wars have ended.

Things that have taken less time than Duke Nukem Forever’s Development:

Science & Technology

• The Wright brothers designed and flew the first airplane.
• The theory of General Relativity.
• The United States’ entire program to put a man on the moon, from Kennedy’s challenge to the landing.

Wars

• The American War for Independence
• The United States Civil War
• World War I
• World War II and the entire Manhattan Project.
• The United State’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

Credits

Big thanks to whoever originally posted the first list, CaptainPsyko, BonzoESC, n1ck, Fish, MrBrainsample, Skroob, stabby, and anyone else I’m missing who chipped in facts for the updated list. Also, thanks to Wikipedia nerds who spend so much time listing weird things like every game Mario is in.

223MB patch.

Will take long time.

I’m excited. Waiting a long time already.

Joy.

Linux and Mac versions hopefully soon. For now XP Thinkpad.

Currently at 15.44! That’s not to bad.

Lets get the stock up. Buy Buy Buy

And no insider trading!

Americas Army 1.9 is Gold. Was able to find a copy already posted. Got medic certification. Surprisingly identical to Red Cross certification (just shorter). Awesome update. Great work on behalf of the AA:O Team. Definitely worth the wait!

My favorite game of all Time F/A-18 Hornet has been updated yet again! F/A-18 Operation Iraqi Freedom. Seems like a sweet game, at a real low price. Check out some screenshots. I loved 2.0, and 3.0 (never got into Korea). This game appears to be a “must have”… since I must have it!

Better go to sleep.