Duke Nukem Forever Developer 3D Realms Goes Dark

Duke Nukem Forever has been in development - and the butt of industry jokes - for over a decade. Now developer 3D Realms has apparently run out of money and shut down.

Some titles in the video game industry take on a life of their own—and some titles take on a life of their own without ever shipping to customers. Duke Nukem Forever—a.k.a Duke Nukem 4—is one of the latter: developer 3D Realms has been working on the game for over 12 years, and—despite occasionally teasing gamers with screenshots and other materials—steadfastly refused to commit to any sort of ship date, insisting only that the game would be available “when it’s done.”

Now, it looks like that date will never come: Duke Nukem developer 3D Realms has apparently run out of money and closed up shop, ending the history of one of the longest running “vaporware” titles in the gaming industry.

Duke Nukem Forever was initially announced in early 1997, with promotional materials appearing throughout the late 90’s and again resurfacing in the last two years.

3D Realms’ publishing arrangment with Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two Interactive in theory leaves the rights to Duke Nukem Forever in the hands of Take-Two, although the company’s relationship with 3D Realms has been bristly in the past, and Take-Two had not been funding development of Duke Nukem Forever.

Duke Nukem titles go all the way back to MS-DOS, although the most successful of the games was 1996’s first-person shooter Duke Nukem 3D, which was one of the first video game titles to incite controversy over its overt sexual references and irreverent humor, although sanitized versions of the game were released for some platforms and in several markets.