Neverever

[davidn]

Just when it looked like they were finally getting somewhere, 3DRealms finally collapsed under the weight of its own inaction today. Joe Siegler seemed quite surprised by the news himself, so it doesn't look like this was something that had been coming for a while - possibly their publisher finally got fed up of the twelve-year wait for them to do anything at all. Most other places that mention the shutdown are quite difficult to get to at the moment as the servers strain under the added weight of the Internet directed towards them.

It's a rather sad whimpering conclusion to a company from the DOS shareware days that I grew up with, though I have to admit that they completely deserved to go, having transformed from their former glory into the industry's longest running joke. In fact, I'm not sure what miracle allowed them to even survive this long, because I can't actually remember the last time they released anything, instead rolling along downhill and punting themselves along with the occasional port or engine licence. Even though their relevance was at an end more than ten years ago, it still feels like the end of an era I grew up with, and I might have to spend some time looking at my Apogee library again this weekend.

In honour of the better times, have some music from Rise of the Triad. Because it was great.

Come to think of it, at least this frees up some people who might be able to give us a new Commander Keen game.

Comments

[kjorteo]

Well, they did actually release Prey in 2006. It seems somewhat forgettable now, but the thing to remember is they had been working on that one since 1995, making it only one year shy of DNF's record. (On the other hand, the fact that they actually commissioned Human Head Studios to make while they produced might have helped.)

Anyway, I had been saying for years that they had managed to make it completely impossible for DNF to live up to its own legacy. Yahtzee put it best when he said "I just hope that 3D Realms understands that if this game doesn't turn out to be history's greatest contribution to human culture and the cure for at least one type of cancer, I and every other reviewer on earth are going to saw its bollocks off." One of the writers from SomethingAwful suggested (several years ago) that the only way for them to save face at this point would have been to release a screensaver and call it Duke Nukem Forever, just accept the backlash for that one, and start working on something new and unrelated with no hype whatsoever, only announcing that they're making a game two or three days before it hits shelves.

[davidn]

Your own release model! There's certainly something to be said for it, if you're working on something alone - it stops you feeling like you're disappointing people after raising expectations (however few), but on the other hand, talking to people about what I'm doing and putting up progress reports and thoughts is what keeps projects of mine alive, and I don't know if I could do something all the way through without having something to show people, or being able to receive the encouragement and suggestions that go with that.

Surprisingly, until DNF superseded it very recently, the game that held the record for time between inception and release was Mother 3, having been on hold in various forms since it was first started for the SNES in 1994. For a while, the N64 version was the one that got the furthest, but I'm very glad that the developers eventually had to abandon it and had the sense to rework it as a GBA game, because the 3D version looked stupendously ghastly.

[starfishchris.livejournal.com]

Team Fortress 2 took a fairly long time to produce too - though at least in Valve's case they didn't sit on their arses playing WoW all day long.

I believe the problem is not so much that progress wasn't made but that work was continually scrapped. Wasting time is a whole different beast to throwing it away, and while sometimes this is a good thing - many ideas need to be developed to see just how viable they are - sometimes you just have to suck it up and make do with what you have. Nothing is perfect, however if your game doesn't have enough merit and requires several cycles of failed ideas, you should move on.

[kjorteo]

Also, this is giving me an uneasy "Oh crap, this reminds me how much I really need to do something with Adventure of Sam" feeling.

[davidn]

Well, we can be stuck with perpetually delayed games together... though I was quite happy yesterday when a small bit of mental arithmetic made me realize that CT2 had been in development for two years so far and not three.

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

what? But, but, how is it supposed to be a funny joke if the company is no longer theoretically producing the game? Now it's just ordinary abandonware; that's not nearly as funny.

[davidn]

If it's any comfort, Take Two have kept the rights to the name of the game (though why they'd want it is beyond me), so the potential is there for someone else to pick it up and upgrade it from cancelled to perpetually delayed once again.