Broussard compared Duke to Nintendo's Mario - a character that would star in title after title, year after year.īut the cycle that would demolish Duke Nukem was about to begin. "We see Duke Nukem as a franchise that will be around 30 years from now, like James Bond," Miller told a gaming site. The firm set no formal deadline, but Miller predicted the game would be out within about a year, "well before" Christmas 1998. In April 1997, Broussard announced a follow-up: Duke Nukem Forever, which he promised would outdo the original in humor, interactivity, and fun. The title sold about 3.5 million copies, making Miller and Broussard straightforwardly wealthy. In most games, the world was static, but Duke Nukem players could interact with objects - they could get Duke to play pool or admire himself in a mirror ("Damn, I'm looking good!" he'd say). The game was addictively fun and crammed with racy humor, including strippers you could tip (at which point they'd flash their pixelated boobs) and mutant pigs dressed in LAPD-like uniforms. After a year and a half of work, Duke Nukem 3D was released online in January 1996. The pair had a knack for discovering talent: One of their recruits was a 17-year-old programmer from Rhode Island - barely out of high school - who created their game engine, the crucial piece of software that displays the 3-D world for the player. Broussard and Miller assembled a seven-person team to build the product. Instead of playing as a faceless marine, gamers would play as Duke Nukem, "a combo of John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Arnold," as Broussard described him. Where other titles were gloomy and self-important, his would be brassy, colorful, and funny. The realistic, lead-spewing shoot-'em-up was born.īy 1994, Broussard began concocting his own breakout game - one that would upend the conventions of the fledgling genre. 3D Realms went from being a $25,000-a-month startup to a $200,000-a-month corporation. It was the first game to let players run around a 3-D first-person environment shooting enemies, and it became a breakout hit, selling 200,000 copies. In 1992, the duo published Wolfenstein 3D, created by a then tiny studio called id Software. They were a study in contrasts: Miller, guarded and quiet, became the savvy business dealer, while Broussard - a voluble, energetic, ponytailed presence who carried around a single notebook as his organizational tool - became the creative impresario, famous for an unerring sense of what was fun. He quit his day job and brought Broussard on. By 1990, he was publishing and marketing titles created by others. When Miller was in his twenties, he invented the shareware model of selling games and formed his company, Apogee (which started going by 3D Realms in 1994): He'd break a game into chunks, release it for free on BBSes, get people addicted, and then charge them for the remaining parts. They would hang out in the computer lab, programming clunky 2-D and text-adventure games. As one patient fan pointed out, when development on Duke Nukem Forever started, most computers were still using Windows 95, Pixar had made only one movie - Toy Story - and Xbox did not yet exist.īroussard and Miller met in the late '70s in Dallas, during Miller's senior year of high school. But the Duke Nukem Forever team worked for 12 years straight. Normally, videogames take two to four years to build five years is considered worryingly long. Screenshots and video snippets would leak out every few years, each time whipping fans into a lather - and each time, the game would recede from view. The team quickly began work on that sequel, Duke Nukem Forever, and it became one of the most hotly anticipated games of all time. ![]() Featuring a swaggering, steroidal, wisecracking hero, Duke Nukem 3D became one of the top-selling videogames ever, making its creators very wealthy and leaving fans absolutely delirious for a sequel. It's the insignia of Duke Nukem 3D, a computer game that revolutionized shoot-'em-up virtual violence in 1996. To videogame fans, that logo is instantly recognizable. They arranged themselves on top of their logo: a 10-foot-wide nuclear-radiation sign, inlaid in the marble floor. So they headed down to the lobby of their building in Garland, Texas, to smile for the camera. Their team was-finally-giving up, declaring defeat, and disbanding. They were videogame programmers, artists, level builders, artificial-intelligence experts. On the last day, they gathered for a group photo.
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