I was curious where the trailers recently found on Gamershell came from....
DNF was never officially dropped, but the abbreviation may very well become true, [D]id [N]ot [F]inish.
What's comical, is that a while back a group of us old school Duke3d players (known competition leaders and tournament winners) contacted 3d realms stating that for several years we've been dealing with the issue of porting Duke3d, and providing a stable and enjoyable network interface/program (as well as TCP/IP support) for people to have the opportunity to play, one of the most influential shooter games of all time. We admitted that obtaining the publically released source code was an obvious help, but we all have/had 'normal' lives, which don't allow us to spend hours upon hours trying to recode and redesign software. We also don't have the funds to 'hire' people to support/aid us. We asked 3drealms, if there was anyone in their establishment, who would be interested in giving us some help, or if anyone there had tried to work on a conversion for Duke3d in the past years, that would like to join forces with us; whilst avid and STILL avid gamers/fans await the arrival of DNF. Their response was "we do not have the staff(as they are all busy), nor the resources to engage and take on such a project." Basically they said 'we don't give a shit, but good luck!"
I had to laugh, it's as if they acted like we asked for one hundred employees....
And I'm thinking to myself, even three would have been helpful, there's still some working there who helped develop Duke3d. Ultimatley I can't think of anything high priority that 3d realms is or has been working on. Grrr.
Well it didn't hurt to try.
This next time we try to pitch the idea to them, I think we'll bust out our last resort/weapon, in saying that they could get together with ID and recode a bunch of the old school shooters for use with the 360, Wii and PS3, in a bundle pack, that had full network support ( where applicable) and could make use of peripherals like keyboards, mic etc as well as the standard controllers. If the game(s) sold well, they could release it for the PC, with some additional features and TCP/IP support(thus making it finally compatible with XP and stable!).
I don't know about yall, but if Doom, Doom II, Quake, Quake II, Seventh Corridor, Duke3d, Shadow Warrior, ROT and some others were put out on current gen consoles, I'd go right out and buy a console just for that!
And this concept isn't exclusive to shooters or anything in specific. Nostalgia titles definatley have a niche in the market, and given how poorly 'modern' games are selling, and how they're not bringing anything new to the table so to speak, I find that releasing old classics that are stable with modern O/Ss to be a very lucrative idea.
How many of us have a game or games that we'd love to still play, whether offline or online, but we simply cannot because we don't own the hardware(console) or the software(98, 95, 3.1, Unix) in order to do so?
EDIT: And please don't mention "E" duke or "X" duke, those ports are a laugh, sadly enough.
