Duke Nukem Forever is coming back! No, this is no joke. 2K Games has made it official. Duke Nukem Forever has been alive and well taken care in the hands of developer Gearbox Software. This might just be one of the longest development cycles for a game, as this game is a sequel to the 1996 game Duke Nukem 3D.

Having faced one of the most severely-protracted development schedules, 3D Realms, the original developer, announced publicly in 2001 that it would be released simply “when it’s done”. Nobody actually gave hope for it, thinking that it’s going to be a legendary vapourware. Who would have thought that they meant it when they said that. But no worries there. 2k Games has reported that they’re in collaboration with Gearbox Software, and the game will have a release date of 2011, which is next year. However, DNF has been having a long known history of being out “next year” statement, thought this time around it has the most serious effort by far, with a working demo. Need a pint of salt?

Some interesting thing to note, is that the ‘community’ is rather upset with Gearbox changing the gameplay elements to “2 weapon system”, while adding their own varieties of the idea as well. However, George Broussard, the creator of Duke himself have this to say:

“Yeah, blame us for it if you want. It may change in the future and I don’t know what will happen with it, but it was us. I stand by it too, as you cannot discount designing games for a modern world and part of that world is consoles where the bulk of the sales can be. And on those consoles you have a controller. We tried for a long time to support lots of guns but we simply could not find a nice way to map it to a controller, despite trying 4-5 designs. We gave it enough time and decided to stop swimming against the current and adopt what was basically the “standard”. It’s not 1996 anymore.”

Well, we’ll know in about a year’s time how this is going to fair.

SOURCE via Wall Street Journal