Ben-DutkaIt's the end of an era and easily the longest-running project that has sparked what we assume is a record number of articles in the past 12 years.
The news first broke at ShackNews a few hours ago: a "very reliable source" who is close to 3D Realms has confirmed that the studio has been shut down. Previously working on the long-awaited Duke Nukem Forever , this unfortunate conclusion has come about due to "funding issues," and all the employees have already been laid off. Initially, it was expected that Apogee, the publisher responsible for the upcoming Duke Nukem Trilogy for the PSP, suffered the same fate, but that's not true. Apogee has just a released a statement saying that what happened to 3D Realms doesn't affect them, and the Deep Silver-developed set of handheld Duke titles remains on track. The first, Duke Nukem: Critical Mass, is still scheduled to launch in September. But as for 3D Realms and DNF…well, that's all she wrote. It was entertaining for quite some time but after a while, everyone had to assume things weren't going as planned. We've often joked about the "so-called existence" of Forever , but we won't be doing that here; we never like to see game studios fail. It's just too bad it had to end before they were able to release what could've been a very cool swan song.
So anyway, it seems you won't be seeing any more headlines with the name "Duke Nukem Forever," and the entire saga has come to a sudden and abrupt end. Well…unless some brave developer wants to pick it up. Hey Square-Enix, don't you wanna do Western stuff, now…?
