A Visual History of Duke Nukem Forever

Only three trailers were released for DNF, each showing a different era in 3D graphics.

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By John Gillooly on 12 May, 2009

With no doubts left about the fate of 3D Realms, many are still clinging to the hope that Duke Nukem Forever (DNF) will be released. However, despite the best wishes of fans, it seems that this is a pipe dream. Not only has Take 2 clarified that it owns the publishing rights to the game in perpetuity, but 3D Realms has neither the staff nor the money to complete the game.

Perhaps the best indicator is the flood of media that we are seeing. Mostly taken from the various resumes of ex-3D Realms employees, everything from unseen gameplay footage to actual design documents have now surfaced. Even if the game was close to release (design docs put it at only 60 percent complete), the sudden unveiling of the entire plot of the game seems the final nail in DNF’s coffin.

One of the defining things about the development of DNF was the often interminable wait between any information about the game. The trickle of facts is well documented by Shacknews in an excellent timeline of the game’s development. It really is depressing to realise that DNF started life using the Quake II engine, which seems so incredibly primitive in an age of CryEngine and Unreal Engine 3. It then swapped to Unreal, then the Unreal Tournament codebase, then allegedly an in-house engine, before landing back on a modified Unreal engine.

This, alone, provides a fascinating look into the evolution of 3D gaming. The trailers and screenshots released over the years often show the same areas in vastly different ways. What is most fascinating now was that each time new screens were released, they showed cutting edge visuals for the time. In hindsight, the low polygon counts, over-dramatic lens flare, simplistic environments, and low-res textures of the early shots look bad – but they serve to illustrate just how much has happened in the meantime.

Just take a look at the first trailer for the game, shown back at E3 in 1998. Based on the then-cutting-edge Quake II engine, it shows what life was like back in the very early days of 3D. At this time, NVIDIA had just begun its ascent to power with the launch of the Riva TNT chip, competing against the Voodoo 2 from 3dfx Interactive. Hardware 3D was a luxury rather than the norm, and a game like DNF looked amazing.

After three silent years, we got our next look at the game, this time using the Unreal engine. Already, it was clear that 3D graphics were entering a golden age – NVIDIA was gaining market share with the GeForce 2 and the GeForce 3 was introducing us to the concept of pixel and vertex shaders. In the trailer, the polygons are still blocky, but the texturing, animation, and lighting work looks generations ahead of the initial trailer.

We were then starved of footage for six years, as 3D Realms again went back to the drawing board. It wasn’t until 2007 that we got a tease of DNF as it ended up. It is hard to believe that, in the time between trailers, entire 3D graphics concepts were born and matured. Techniques like normal mapping and soft shadowing were unheard of at the time of the 2001 trailer – they are commonplace in this one. This was the era of the GeForce 8 and RADEON HD series of graphics cards – in 2001, ATI wasn’t even considered a serious competitor in the 3D gaming stakes.

Those three trailers comprise all the footage that 3D Realms officially released during the development of DNF. Sadly, the most extensive footage of the game has only emerged in the aftermath of the company’s death.

Animator Brian Brewer uploaded the following video resume, which was discovered by fans and widely distributed. It is important to remember this is designed to show off animation work, and is not designed as a trailer. So, it contains some untextured work as well as a lot of shots where Duke falls over. If you watch carefully, one such moment seems to involve the same mine-cart sequence that appeared in both the 1998 and 2001 trailers – despite 12 years of development, it is fascinating to see that same scene still rear its head.

What is perhaps the most depressing is that this resume piece shows some pretty interesting looking gameplay. While it is now all but confirmed that we will never actually get to play DNF, it looked like all those years had actually amounted to something special. One wonders what would have been if 3D Realms had focused on getting the game out, rather than trying to constantly go back to the drawing board to cope with the relentless march of technology.

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