The game character and franchise that simply refuses to die, Duke Nukem, may be resurrected in a 2K Games developed titled called Duke Begins. Although a full fledged Duke Nukem title hasn't been released in ten years, Duke Nukem developer Apogee Software incidentally revealed the game Duke Begins in a court filing last Friday. The filing, which was a response to a suit filed against them by Take-Two Interactive over the rights to the Duke Nukem, has some interesting information on Duke Begins which we've pasted below.
On October 22, 2007, Apogee, Take-Two, and 2K Games entered into an agreement in which Apogee granted 2K Games the exclusive right to develop and publish a new videogame based upon Apogee’s Duke Nukem franchise… The new game was given the working title of “Duke Begins” and is not the same game as the DNF game…
The original development schedule for the Duke Begins game provided that the game was to be completed and commercially released by mid-2010…
Take Two and/or its subsidiary 2K Games halted or otherwise cancelled all development work by the third-party game developer on the Duke Begins game in April 2009… without Apogee’s approval or consent…
When Apogee confronted Take-Two and 2K Games about the… cancellation of the Duke Begins development work… Take-Two and 2K Games simply denied it… Take-Two and 2K Games are taking such actions with a goal of pressuring Apogee to sell the Duke Nukem franchise rights to Take-Two for less than their true value.
A new Duke Nukem game that’s not Duke Nukem Forever? It sounds like Duke Nukem has a power that game developers never programmed into him; the power to regenerate himself from the smallest pieces of himself, even when lawsuits and developers kill him.
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This article appears in Jun 24-30, 2009.