![]() ![]() It's surprisingly fresh to have a guy turn up like that who doesn't give a crap." Duke, by contrast, doesn't have any freaking problems. With Brothers In Arms we took a tone that was all about sacrifice and loss. Most of our heroes in contemporary media have become emo. I think that is one of the reasons that Duke is so sticky at the moment. "When we think about Duke: he is such an interesting guy," he enthuses. Pitchford has no doubts that Nukem is relevant today, likening the character to Tony Stark in the recent Iron Man films. It's something to do with him: the character." It has nothing to do with truly great Duke Nukem games because, honestly, there haven't been any. In that process it became clear that Duke Nukem had become a meme. We reflected on this a lot, looked at the internet and studied trends trying to work out if Duke has a place in the contemporary landscape of games. "Before we jumped in with the acquisition we all studied what the character and gameplay meant in today's world. What interest would a teenage boy have in a waxy-textured stripper? And what interest would a 30-something man have in a one-dimensional sexist monster? What hope has that of selling? Today, every computer is "a window to infinite pornography," as Pitchford puts it with wry eloquence. He is an anachronism born of gaming's juvenile years when the hobby was a grubby niche and its primary audience horny teenage boys for whom a pixelated cleavage represented the dizzying height of puberty-era titillation. So why the gamble? Because Duke Nukem is a gung-ho, misogynist knucklehead a Schwarzenegger parody whose quips have none of the wit of a Nathan Drake and whose character is as fleeting as the cigar smoke that leaks incessantly from his mouth. Pitchford describes looking over the scraps of the completed game that came to him in the deal as "feeling a bit like Indiana Jones, finding jewels of great worth that simply had to be shown to the wider world." And so, for the next 24 months, Pitchford and his team have been working to tie up 3D Realms' vision for the game, tailoring it for multiplatform release, and creating a slew of multiplayer modes to sit alongside the near-complete single-player campaign that they were given in the acquisition. By that point the game had become an industry laughing stock, its shared acronym with the term 'Did Not Finish' a punch-line to a joke that, for staff at 3D Realms, at least, was more tragedy than comedy. Part of that package was the code to Duke Nukem Forever, the game that 3D Realms had been toiling away at since 1997 before having to sell Duke away due to lack of funding. ![]() Gambling on things is something Pitchford became well acquainted with in 2009 when his studio, Gearbox Software acquired the rights to the beleaguered franchise. You have to take a gamble with these things. "Of all the things I planned to talk about tonight, the gay robot sidekick was not among them." Randy Pitchford, current and final steward of Duke Nukem Forever, the video game that has been in development for longer than any other, shoots the front three rows of assembled journalists a glare. ![]()
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