And there’s nothing that greasy bastard can do about any of it.
2022 was practically a year of Duke, though it was a year of leaks in general. Notably, prototypes for Duke Nukem Forever (2001) and Rayman 4, among others, were leaked. But out of everything leaked, Duke just had more. Late last month, the 2D platformer build of Duke Nukem Forever from 1996 (made before the one Randy wound up bastardizing) dropped, and is actually playable online (here) or found here with other leaks like the 2010 Duke Nukem movie pitch (spoiler alert: it fucking blows)and the Duke hunting game titled Duke Nukem: Endangered Species. But 2022 gave us one last gift: a leak of the prototype for a remake of Duke Nukem 3D Titled Duke Nukem: Reloaded.
The story goes pretty much how you’d expect in the end, though the beginning is the interesting part. Initially, Duke Nukem: Next Gen (as it was called in 2010) was a fan project to remake the game in Unreal Engine 3. It looked good; good enough to get the attention of Gearbox, along with their blessing, and a name change to Duke Nukem: Reloaded. But within a year, Reloaded gets put on hold. Per the personal account of project lead Frederik Schreiber in a blog post:
Gearbox Software, told us that Duke Reloaded, had been getting too much attention from the press and the fans. We were required to pull all media related to Reloaded, from our website and Facebook. We were also told, not to talk about it anymore.
Frederik Schreiber
If there’s a reason for Gearbox’s brake pump, it’s likely the Greasy Randy version of Duke Nukem Forever coming out that year and we all know how that song and dance went. When asked if Reloaded might see a release at a later date, the Gearbox rep shot the following back:
We can’t give you an answer to that. Ofcourse you can keep working on it, if you want to. But we can’t tell you if we will allow the game to be released.
It’s worth noting that the team was burning their own money on this project the entire time. Interceptor Entertainment (the fan group working on the game) shelved the project and moved on. Fast forward to today, however, and things get better. x0r_jmp, the group that previously leaked the 2001 build of Duke Nukem Forever, puts up a prototype of Reloaded on December 31st. It’s labeled “test-version 0.001”, but Hollywood Holocaust is there along with a number of other maps, and you can spawn NPCs to get into some Unreal antics.
And the real treat is finding that x0r_jmp isn’t done yet. They’ve claim to “have several new releases lined up for 2023, so watch this space for updates!”.
The story of Interceptor does have a happy ending, at least as of now, though. They were responsible for the 2013 remake of Rise of the Triad, before changing names to Slipgate Ironworks and co-developing Ghostrunner, and are currently working on a sequel to Ion Fury titled Phantom Fury. Oh, and Frederik Schreiber is now the CEO of 3D Realms.
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