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GR: Having a close relationship with the 3D Realms guys, what do you perceive as having been their biggest problems?
MG: Not having been there it’s hard to say, and the thing is, if they all had the same story and the same reason, then they probably would have fixed it. So it’s hard to say from the outside. My speculation is that it was essentially the pursuit of perfection. And not having the right resources and the right ability to get there. It’s impossible to get to there.
Above: He might be a more cerebral kicker of alien arse, but Gordon and Duke have a lot in common
GR: It always seemed to me that there a strange unofficial leap-frogging rivalry between3D Realmsand Half-Life. Duke 3D is really under-rated for doing a lot of things with level design and interactivity that Half-Life got the credit for later.
RP: Yes. That’s right, I agree with that. And Half-Life definitely understood what worked about Duke Nukem and iterated on that and leveraged it. Even to the point of leveraging the same weapons. Like trip wires and satchel charges and pipe bombs, and all that stuff.
But I mean, you know what, it doesn’t matter. I worked on some of the Half-Life games and I loved it. We’re all just making games here and everyone’s just learning from everybody else. I mean on Duke Nukem 3D itself, we stole from Aliens. You know, Facehuggers and shit.
GR: As well as buying the game, Gearbox has bought the franchise rights. Is this a one-off, or is this going to be the restart of the series?
MG: Oh yeah, we’re going to do Duke Five-ever next, right? (laughs) The reason for the IP thing is actually a matter of trust and care for the brand. If we were just to acquire Duke Nukem Forever but we did not have any interest in the future, they would know, “These guys are just doing a cash grab. They’re just getting in there, meddling around, and then flipping it in a box and shipping it”. By us also being responsible for the brand, now they understand that, “Hey, those guys have an interest in the future. They’re not going to crap this one out and destroy this thing”. Because now we’ve invested. Now 3D Realms know that we’re in it for the long-term. That was the smartest way we thought of to do it, Because we didn’t just go and buy it. They decided to sell it to us.
RP: When you do something like that, you do it because you think there’s a long-term thing. But I haven’t planned a long-term thing. Right now all of the attention has to be focused on making sure that this works out. And it’s not until this is finished that I will be comfortable spending any amount of mind-share thinking about what’s next. Because if we spend mind-share thinking about what’s next and something isn’t quite good enough or it doesn’t happen, then I’ll never be able to live with myself.
Above: Gearbox's brilliant-looking Aliens game in 2008. Do want
GR: I noticed that your other post-Borderlands projects went quiet about a year or so ago. Is it right to assume that Duke has had a knock-on effect on say, Colonial Marines?
RP: No, those things have nothing to do with each other. In the studio we have about 200 people, and at any given time there’s also about 100 – 200 people outside of the studio working for us. So we’re about 300 – 400 strong depending on what’s going on with the external partners. The Duke team is currently about 70 people, so not even a quarter of the capability of my studio is on it.
GR: Are we going to see Duke as part of the future Gearbox roster now, alongside Colonial Marines and Borderlands?
MG: That I guess, depends on how this does. With Borderlands we didn’t even know we were going to do DLC. We design it and start doing it until that thing was shipping. So that’s the way we’re approaching this. We’re fortunate enough to be a studio large enough that we don’t have to set ourselves up to do things where we’re not sure. So now we get to get good choices where we know that we’re going to get the most to the gamers.
Yesterday, I went gleefully hands-on with the same demo that Brett played at PAX. Make sure to check out his accountright here, if you haven't already. And know this from me: It plays like a dream, and it's funny as hell.
