Randy: What do you want to talk about, Bob Smith?
Bob: Duke Nukem 2001
Randy: Yeah? What about it?
Bob: Are you guys gonna do anything with it? If you guys have the files and stuff.
Randy: Yeah definitely, actually.
So, I actually did a live call with either Google Hangout or Skype with a couple of folks that were from Duke4.net I'm guessing they're from there. Pretty much people that call interested in that are from there. And this guy Frederik who made Bombshell and who's been interested in Duke since forever as long as I know and this other guy Richard, who is a moderator on Duke4.net and I think he kinda runs Duke4.net and it's super Duke like, crazy Duke fan and also has put a lot of himself into Duke3D in the sense of you know, keep helping people get together to keep the editor going and himself even working on the editor and having other folks from the mod community, so we all got on this live chat and you can probably find a record of it on the Internet somewhere, and this came up and what I explained was that long before Gearbox ever was involved, a publishing company called TakeTwo had the rights to publish Duke Nukem Forever, which means they have the rights to all things Duke Nukem Forever including old content.
Now, what I have been doing is in fact, we did a license which allows us to commercially release Duke Nukem Forever now, so we've licensed back from TakeTwo the rights that they have. They still have their rights, but we now also have a sub license basically to distribute. But what we don't yet have is something that allows us to give legacy stuff away for free. And so, I'm working on that and I think the way to do it is to have a new package with things like Forever and all the old Megaton stuff and maybe the 20th Anniversary, basically everything we can get together. It's a new package and then have the old DNF stuff as sort of this free giveaway, this free bonus that you can have access to if you have that. That's right now, that's the easiest legal path to do this.
But, by the way, you should know you will be disappointed with what you see there. I was the same as everybody else when I saw the trailers in 1999 and the trailers in 2001 and I thought that look awesome, I want that. And it built up in my head, the actual people that work on this stuff they did some great work, but there was no game, right? So if you have in your mind that there's a game that you can play, you'll be disapointed.
What you'll have are little vignette snippets, incomplete pieces of stuff. I in fact talked with -- very recently because it's brewed up again, somebody noticed something and referenced some stuff that Frederik had talked about like months ago or even a year ago and this became a new topic maybe it was Reddit or one of the Chans where some of the trollier types hang out which is why I suspected you might be a troll, but it bubbled up again and the expectation that they had created or had created for them not an expectation I created and not accurate is that they're sending a full game there, there's hours of gameplay, that's just not the case -- and I had a conversation last week with, let's see Keith Schuler, who work's at Gearbox, who worked on Duke Nukem Forever since the time I left 3D Realms back in 1997 all the way up until like 2007 which includes working all the way through the 1999 and 2001 trailers, talked with Brian Cozzens who was the art director on Duke Nukem Forever during the era who also is an employee of Gearbox, I've talked with Stephen Cole who's a level designer at Gearbox who was also at 3D Realms during all that time, John Anderson who was a level designer during another time and I've had conversations with Allen, he's in San Diego now.
And they all say now's that bullshit, there's not hours and hours of gameplay, there's nothing that resembles finished, somebody said something that was 90% complete, not even close. Maybe 9% complete might be a more accurate number. But there is some cool stuff there, and if you're interested in seeing into what game development looks like when game development isn't done, you're gonna see some interesting things, you'll see some works in progress, you'll see assets from that year, you'll see snippets of level design from that era.
Erica: I do think that that's truly what I've seen of it, I think it's really interesting and if your expectation is correct, it is really interesting, and it's a cool look into what was really behind all of the... right?
Randy: It is!
Erica: And that's cooler I think, than a lost "game" (does that thing with fingers -- finger quotes)
Randy: I wish there was a lost game, I wish there was. But if there was, it would have been released. There was nothing even in the vicinity of releasable, and in fact, to this day I think that, you know, 3D Realms never released Duke Forever. The people, about half of the development team didn't want to give up, and they assembled the game that was the thing that got released commercially, and I think they're proud that they stuck it through and saw that happen, and I'm glad that I got to see it and play through it, but I think you'll see other people like, I mean, who knows what his opinion is today, but I do remember talking to George about this one point and he said like, "yeah there's a reason why we never released it", and that's because you don't want people to be disapointed.
But it is a study into history, and into the history of game development, really neat. And I talked to Allen actually, who when I last talked to Allen Blum he was motivated to help out in the kind of curating of that, like how do you consume this content, do we need a tour guide and should that tour guide be Allen to help us understand and consume this content?
But absolutely, it's got to get out there and there's a whole lot of complexity behind it.
One, there's some legal complexity, we've got to do things right.
Two, there is some actual software complexity to this. This is ancient stuff that does not really run right on modern systems, so we either gotta just say good luck, or we've got to do something to kind of prepare it and package it in some way that makes it actually accessible to someone. I'm not going to be the one doing that work, but I've enlisted, like, this is an objective within Gearbox to make sure this happens and we've got to fight through these challenges before it can be real. Game developers can dig through the stuff, and people that are not risk averse of digging though unfinished software will find some things, but they won't be able to use everything. Like, the more in-depth you are, the more likely you'll be able to see the full content of what actually exists there. But most people, I'm afraid, won't be able to even see anything in it's current state because it's just not accessible to lay people and it's really developer-only kind of stuff.
Did that answer your question Bob?
Bob: Yes
Randy: How do you feel about that?
Bob: I'm fine with it, I just want to see what it looks like
Randy: What are you expecting? What do you expect to see? What do you think it's there?
Bob: I expect to see something interesting, like some interesting game mechanics.
Randy: Well, you're not gonna see much beyond what was in the trailer, right. Like imagine you see a movie and then you can walk around the set of that movie. Yeah, you can look at some things that the camera's not looking at, but it's still the same movie set, and it's when you look at, when you look around at the things that the camera wasn't pointed on for the trailer, it doesn't look as good. There's a reason why the cameras are pointed in the directions they are pointing in, right. So, if you're prepared for that, you're gonna enjoy digging through it.
One of the things that I think has hurt it, from an expectation point of view, is that through the decisions made by George and Scott Miller when 3D Realms had shut down and when you know, there's a lot of mess, and through some of these decisions, some other people got access to things and as a consequence of that, it's kind of become... there's like a different hype around the 2001 stuff and the 1999 stuff building it up as if it's more than it is, and because it's kind of cool for some of those people to be in the club of those that have seen it, you know, those that got access. And I think those of us that saw those trailers back when they came out and really wanted those great amazing games to come out, I think that's done these minds a disservice, and I'm sorry if you're one of those minds. I've tried my best not to be part of that, and to just you know, I've tried my best to do right, but I get it if you have expectations that have never been fulfilled, and I know that there's some people that put a lot of that on me. I've tried to, for my part.
We've invested a lot and spend a lot and lost a lot, and took a lot of heat just to make sure that Duke isn't dead. Where Duke was before we got involved was, it didn't come out, wasn't ever gonna come out, the people behind it were being sued for many many millions of dollars, they were in millions of dollars of debt, and they had no ability to pay any developer to continue. That was the state that Duke was in, and now not only did we get to have Forever whether you liked it or not, it existed and we got to experience it.
We also now have a chance to get access to all the other stuff and there's hope for a future for Duke which I think is what's more interesting. There's a real path towards a future of new Duke Nukem games and I think that is what we should all be looking forward to and hoping for and wanting to see the best stuff.
Erica: I know that there's a lot that we can't, why we can't reveal the full complexity of it, of all the legal aspects and things like that, but having seen it from the inside and seeing just how complex the situation really is, but we're still trying to bring things to people, I mean, it really is a testament to how much love there is for Duke at Gearbox. And I mean, I was not a Duke Nukem fan when I started and there was something about, why is Randy still trying to bring this to people, that kind of piqued my curiosity and made me really dig into Duke and it's, frankly, I've seen you attempt crazy things for that game.
Randy: Yeah, it's a mess. You know, I told the story back when we first reannounced Duke Nukem Forever that it was like, the way I felt about it, imagine that you're driving down a desert highway in the middle of nowhere and in front of you there's a horrible car accident, like it's just a mess, and there's metal and gears all over the street, and there's bodies and blood and it's just a disaster.
Do you just drive past and keep going because you've got places to go, and you've got a whole carload of people that are on their way to Walley World, or do you pull over and see if you can help out? Well it's not even that simple of a question like, most people just keep driving, they might call somebody, but they're not gonna pull over and get their hands dirty.
But this wasn't just any car, it was like, my old boss, it was my first job, you know. That's who was in the car, and we're not driving any car, but we happen to be in an ambulance, and right behind this is a tractor trailer, a tow truck, and we've got mechanics and doctors and we've got all kinds of people you need to deal with this kind of accident. Also, it's the middle of the desert, there's literally no one else around, if we kept driving, that's it.
But if we stopped and helped, we want to be able to help out and yeah, it's expensive, it's messy, we've been hurt, some people have blamed us for a whole bunch of stuff, we could have just kept driving and no one had been wiser and had nothing to do with this, but I think Duke deserved more than that and deserves more than that, and that's why we pulled over, and that's why we've been helping as best as we can.
Erica: How could you live with not knowing what was salvageable from the wreck?
Randy: Yeah, right? How could you live with yourself just driving on and not knowing like, are they dead, you know. You've got to help, so that's what we did and that's what we're still doing.
Hey, anything else you want to talk about, Bob Smith?
Bob: Nah, I just want to close.
Randy: Why do you feel like you needed to use a fake name with us?
Bob: What? Bob Smith is my real name
Randy: Wow, okay. I'll let it be then. Well, thanks for you call.
(after ending call)
Randy: What do you think, do you think that guy's really Bob Smith?
Erica: I mean, there's gotta be a Bob Smith in the world, maybe he is.
Randy: Sure, he really took a long time when I asked what his name is. But what strucked me wasn't that he used a fake name, it's why he felt like he needed to. I don't know what he's afraid of.
