What's his appeal with snow? How would that work?
Damn, that's some character modeling.
When he went full perfection, he requested that a snow level be added because of the criminally overlooked 2002 horror-shooter game The Thing.
George Broussard might have revolutionised gaming with the Shareware model, but the fame got to his head, and when it came to Duke Nukem Forever, he decided to scrap select builds of the game and start over to make Forever the greatest game anyone has ever seen. It was this behaviour that killed the Duke Nukem franchise.
There was a story about Broussard playing the first No One Lives Forever and got hyped as fuck then told the team that they had to a snow level now. The game takes place in Las Vegas, so... DNF being built as a technical showcase probably meant that snow wouldn't just be the ground colored white, even GoldenEye 64 have more advanced snow than that.
To be fair, before Gearbox Randy took what he learned at 3DRealms and formed "Rebel Boat Rockers" where they made a shooter(Pax) that promised a lot and was never released.
Ayup! Doctor Proton, who would've been the bad guy at this point, had infected most of the EDF with a virus. Honestly, it makes for a more intriguing premise than the final product.
I remember being told Randy Pitchford wanted to sit on the Duke licence until Jon Saint John passed/was too old for the role so there could never be any more Duke games. I don't know if Randy said that, or it's just speculation, but I can believe it.
In the trailer, the general says the EDF is compromised, and to trust no-one.
DNF is a classic cautionary tale of "the perfect being the enemy of the good". The game was announced in 1997 and was pretty close to being finished multiple times, but the head of 3D Realms (George Broussard) kept demanding the game be scrapped, usually for very trivial reasons, and work on the game started back at square one. This kept happening until 3D Realms eventually ran out of money and the company was bought out by Gearbox Software, owned by Randy Pitchford, the guy responsible for other infamous trainwrecks like Aliens: Colonial Marines and Battleborn, who then released a half-arsed, slapped-together version of the game in 2011 - nearly fifteen years after it was first announced.
Yeah, I can believe that, too bad for Randy that people would just accept that JSJ would have passed and gotten somebody who could do a close approximation of Duke.
You can tell what parts of the game were made after certain games came out when playing the finished DNF. There's a crane physics puzzle that feels right out Half-Life 2. There's an out of place "power armour is for pussies" joke when someone offers Duke the Halo armour, which is all the more pathetic when you notice how much is lifted from Halo. Extended vehicle levels, recharging health, and a two weapon limit spring to mind. There were likely others, but most of the game is extremely forgettable.
Well, Duke Nukem games actually contain many porn references, so it wouldn't be super out of place.
Don't forget about the dildo fetch quest. It was a truly revolutionary moment in gaming where you could live out your cuckold fantasies in an FPS for the first time.
Slight edit on the Quake engine part, Quake 2 was in development when DNF work started, they had intended to make a technical spec of the game using the Quake engine and then update it with Quake 2's engine features when the tools were ready. This version had the least work done IIRC, with just some models, animations and test maps, with the one trailer from this period apparently being nothing more than a scripted sequence.
