Apparently, ten years and counting - with no end in sight, either.

A decade ago today, on April 27th, 1997, 3D Realms formally announced the development of the sequel to their popular Duke Nukem 3D FPS. The first “true 3D” entry in the series, Duke Nukem Forever was to be to Quake what DN3D itself was to DOOM — injecting a heavy dose of risqué humor and “attitude” into the typically grim and foreboding settings generally favored by id Software at the time.

Well, here we are, ten years later… and Duke Nukem Forever has become synonymous with “vaporware,” a long-running gag on gaming message boards and 4chan wannabes netwide. Officially, the game is still an active project for 3D Realms; it’s still listed on their website as an in-development project, with a projected release date of “When it’s done.” However, you can probably count the total number of people outside the company who actually think DNF will ever see the light of day on store shelves on one hand… and still have enough fingers left over to eat a bowl of ramen with chopsticks.

It’s interesting to see where we were a decade ago in relation to where we are today. In 1997, the top of the line PC was a Pentium 133 with 64-128 MB of RAM, a hard drive with size still measured in MB rather than GB, and Windows 95 SE was the dominant OS. For gaming, you had a Sound Blaster AWE32 card, and a graphics board with no hardware acceleration (unless you were one of the lucky few to have the original Voodoo card); Quake I, in fact, could still render its 3D environs totally in software. High-speed Internet in every home was still a pipe dream (no pun intended) for many, and multiplayer deathmatches in DN3D and DOOM were still primarily accomplished via LAN or even null-modem cable. Things such as USB, firewire, and even DVD media were either unknown outside of techie communities or simply nonexistent in the first place. It was also, perhaps, a more innocent time for gamers in general; for instance, in 1997 no one outside Colorado had ever heard the name “Columbine,” and Jack Thompson was still chasing ambulances in Florida rather than blaming all the evils of the world on video games (or, in Jackworld, “murder simulators”).

This was to have been the environment Duke Nukem Forever would have been released in. But, a funny thing happened on the way to the marketplace… 3D Realms became fixated on making the game perfect, or at least as perfect as they possibly could. Thus, development on DNF began to take an almost glacial pace, as months turned into years with no completed game in sight. Stopgap games, primarily for the consoles, were meant to tide Duke fans over until the real sequel could be released, even as the street date for DNF kept getting pushed back further and further. Originally it was to have used the Quake II engine, but licensing issues with id (and, some might say, technology advancing faster than the development rate could keep up with) prompted a change to the Unreal engine. 3DR began focusing on other projects and products as their primary source of revenue, such as Max Payne and Prey. Gamers began to get the idea that Duke was never coming out, and gravitated to other franchises. Eventually the FPS fad finally tapered off as the genre became focused on simulating actual combat experiences from WWII and other real-life conflicts, especially in a post-9/11 world where the thought of Independence Day-like scenarios (the ones favored by the Duke Nukem series) began to hit a little too close to home for many. The rise to prominence of MMORPGs like EverQuest and World of Warcraft pretty much spelled the end of the FPS as the dominant PC gaming genre.

And still, there is no sign of Duke Nukem Forever being released. Not today, not next year… maybe never.

Or just “when it’s done.”

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