By Alan Bell
Since Duke Nukem Forever was announced, there have been quite a few other games released. How many? A lot - including every Grand Theft Auto game, all Zelda games since (and including) the Ocarina of Time and more than 25 Final Fantasy games (for more, check out the infamous DNF list).
Gearbox Software, the Borderlands guys, stepped in sometime after the demise of the original developer, 3D Realms, in 2009. We sat down with them last week to find out what they've been up to...
The guys in question were Randy Pitchford, who runs the studio, and Steve Gibson - the guy who setup Shack News all those years ago before being wooed into development by Gearbox.
There was someone else involved in the interview too, sort of, as Randy spent most of the time ignoring us and tapping away on his Blackberry. We don't know who it was on the other end of the phone, so we're going to assume it was Shigeru Miyamoto, for no other reason than he's spectacularly awesome and someone we'd like to interview one day.
NZGamer.com: So tell us, Steve, why are you in development now? Why did you make the jump from journalism?
Steve Gibson: It’s not super exciting... around my wife’s thirtieth birthday I was planning a big party, with her family flying in from Pennsylvania. And then two days before this party... I get word of a Diablo 3 event... and...um, I found myself having to stay back and do this, and miss my wife’s own surprise birthday party.
It was a terrible decision. But I had all these guys depending on me... and I had to make a decision that’s right for my company and right for my employees who have their own mortgages and their own life. So I’m making the life sacrifices there, and it was like, this isn’t where I want to be, you know.
So I decided to sell, six months later I sold. You know, it was as simple as that: it wasn’t the life I wanted, you know. And now, you know, my wife’s pregnant, and starting a family life.
NZGamer.com: Congratulations! I’ve got to say, going from a situation where you found yourself over committed perhaps, and not focussing on the right things, videogame development seems like a strange thing to be jumping into!
Steve Gibson: It was... it is my passion, you know, but the thing is like I can file for vacation with this job now, you know?
NZGamer.com: I understand, I understand.
Steve Gibson: [laughs] There’s the difference. There’s distributed responsibility at Gearbox; I can work [with] a bunch of guys and pre-plan a vacation, and I can take off for a week. I took a cruise last year, I hadn’t taken a vacation in a dozen years.
I took a fifteen day cruise...[to Randy] I don’t know if you remember... I was gone, I went to like Russia and Iceland and stuff.
Randy Pitchford: tap tap tap click tap tap
NZGamer.com: So Duke Nukem specifically - what was your role on that exactly?
Steve Gibson: It’s funny... around the time we get word [about DNF], I’d been at Gearbox for a little while but, as you know, through my connections I also knew George [Broussard - top-dog at 3D Realms and one of the creators of Duke Nukem].
I was on the phone with George before this deal was happening and talking to [him] about ‘hey, should I sell this brand and sell this game to Gearbox’? And he was asking me specifically because he knew that I came to work at Gearbox not for the money, because obviously I didn’t, but because of the people I knew at Gearbox. He knew that I would give him an honest opinion if I thought these guys were just going to screw up the brand and tank the game and just try and get a little cash out of it.
But I didn’t believe that. The reason I came to work at Gearbox was that I knew Randy and I knew Brian [Martel, another founder of Gearbox Software], and I had such a huge amount of respect for what they do, and the way they carry themselves and their business.
So I told George this... I told him that I know not just the business commitment, but the emotional and personal commitment that Randy and the partners at Gearbox had to Duke Nukem was beyond anywhere else they could possibly imagine. And I knew that 3D Realms could have just said screw it, nobody’s getting it, and we’re shutting it down, and they were willing to do that... they were going to court and fighting with the publisher, instead of trying to finish the game.
It was amazing to be part of how that deal happened.
NZGamer.com: With regard to the game itself, how much of what we see today, and what we’re likely to see on June 10th when it comes out... how much of that is what was handed over to Gearbox back in 2009-2010?
Steve Gibson: Well, there’s a couple of things, I mean... like the intent of making a worthy successor - that remains. The premise of saving the world, that remains. But if you’re talking like, say, man months of effort and things like that, Gearbox, by the time we ship this is, going to be 2,500 man months into it.
The actual core intent of the game design, a lot of those things, we are just bringing across the finish line what 3D Realms designed now. We are not twisting it all up, what we are doing is finishing it. We’re putting in our, you know... I guess, large amount of resources into finishing this out, getting it on all the console platforms, you know, getting multiplayer up and running, getting it bug free, getting it through certification... those are all giant efforts, that was tough to imagine that...so at 3D Realms they had like 20-30 guys, right?
Randy Pitchford: 32
Steve Gibson: 32 guys right? Gearbox is...[to Randy] what’s our man... you know how many guys we have on it right now?
Randy Pitchford: Um, a little over a 100.
Steve Gibson: So imagine that, and imagine [that] even once we got involved it was over a year before we told anyone, because that’s how much effort had to happen. So it’s weird to quantify, because yes, they decided like ‘hey there’s going to be xyz’, that’s still in the game, but we get in there, and we help clean it up, you know...we help make it actually work on the console, so that’s all valuable work, all that had to happen for the game to ship. But it’s just hard to really say okay, was there a pull here or a pull here, it’s not really that simple anymore.
NZGamer.com: Duke was a very big multiplayer game, like, at the time it was one of the few games, it was a very big deal on the LAN gaming scene, before the Internet, really. Obviously the landscape’s changed quite a bit - what’s the situation with it now, I mean what sort of market space is the multiplayer aimed at? Is it aimed at your real hard core gamers, is it something for guys to do in their downtime when they’re not levelling their characters in other games?
Steve Gibson: This is for the guys who just like to laugh and have fun with their friends. You know, certainly there’s ranking and all that stuff, and there’s the system where you can have cool unlockables, [things] like that, but this is for the guys who just want to be entertained, more than anything else.
Randy Pitchford: tap tap tap tap tap click
NZGamer.com: Can they do that in a local context, as well as online, like, can they do that with link play on a console? LAN play?
Steve Gibson: [asks Randy]
Randy Pitchford: Yeah, it supports LAN, it supports Internet.
NZGamer.com: Okay. LAN on consoles as well?
Randy Pitchford: Yeah
Steve Gibson: Well that’s one I didn’t know.
NZGamer.com: How many players?
Randy Pitchford: it’s 4 v 4 max, It’s designed to be...um, it’s been a while since we had an experience where like, even 1 v 1 was fun. it was designed to be a really fast, kind of in-your-face gameplay, and it’s also using the unique weapons of Duke Forever. A lot of shooters now, it’s all about just the reaction time skill test, using a ballistic weapon to get your cursor on the enemy before he gets one on you.
Duke has all these other interesting weapons, this variety - you can set a pipe bomb trap, like lay some pipe bombs down, maybe in a room with a security camera on it, so that you can run around and watch the security camera when you see somebody go in there, blow ‘em up.
This kind of begs for a kind of... more dense, kind of closer... combat experience. So when you actually get in a 4v4 game, it’s crazy, it feels like a kind of chaos, constantly. It’s a lot of fun for people like that’s why LAN’s supported, you can get folks together and have a great time as a party, but obviously it supports internet too, so if your friend happens to be in a different house, or a different city, you’re fine.
NZGamer.com: So did you stop to think about this? Or did you just say “Yep, we’ll do it” as soon as you heard about it?
Randy Pitchford: We stopped to think about it. It’s a big decision, a very deep contemplation. Once we decided, there was a lot more time with negotiation, the business complexities - both with us and with 3D Realms. We acquired a franchise, and a game, and with 2K, there was lawsuits, between 3D Realms and Take 2, and there was an existing publishing relationship. So there was a lot of complicated business, so not only did we think hard before we endeavoured to go through that business, but all along the way everyone involved got to think and rethink and rethink and second guess everything, as we’re dealing with that complexity and creating a new business arrangement that makes it work for everyone.
So there you have it. Duke releases on the 10th of June, going head to head with inFAMOUS 2 and Red Faction Armageddon - which, in a way, confirms many gamers long held suspicion that the infamous DNF making it to retail would signal the apocalypse; we just didn't know it would be on Mars.
Thanks to Steve, Randy and Shigsy for granting us the interview. Portions of the interview that didn't affect the outcome have been edited for brevity and clarity.
NZGamer.com