The development of the game "Duke Nukem Forever" has taken over a DECADE. Based on a lawsuit filed Friday by Take-Two Interactive, it might continue.

On Friday, publisher Take-Two Interactive Software sued 3DRealms (doing business as Apogee Software) after 3DRealms closed its doors a week earlier.

For fans of the game, however, there's still hope: 3DRealms has been ordered to appear before a New York State Supreme Court judge on June 11 to argue why the judge should not order 3DRealms to turn over the Duke Nukem Forever source code to Take-Two, as the company has apparently asked the judge to do. The proposed order was part of the Take-Two suit.

The sequel to Duke Nukem 3D, a DOOM contemporary, was originally due on or around 1998. Since then, it has undergone multiple revisions and alleged revisions in its 3D engine, all contributing to delay after delay. In 2006, industry reports claimed that a large chunk of its staff left the company, causing the development team to begin again.

The order also implies that the judge might order 3DRealms to be "enjoined from disclosing, distributing, transferring or selling to any party other than Take-Two any proprietary information RELATED to DNF (including the existing source and object code for DNF) and be required to maintain and enforce all security measures necessary to preserve the confidentiality of such proprietary information".

Unfortunately, a video of the several DNF art elements, including gameplay, some risque 3D imagery and salty language, was leaked to the Web soon after the 3DRealms team shut down.

I forgot all about that.  Oughta call it "Duke Nukem Takes Forever" and call it a day...   

early on, the problem they had was they couldn't seem to decide on an engine. one month they're using the unreal engine- the next their using the quake II engine. It was almost as if one person went up to the project lead and said, "hey, this engine is really cool, I think we should rewrite all the code we've written for our current equally proficient engine to use this other one for a negative net gain because we'll need to license it and pay for another 500 man hours on top of those already used creating the code I propose to replace.". Later on, it was basically:

"well, the person that wrote that is gone, and even though his comments clearly state the expected inputs and outputs, I think it would be on the safe side if we re-wrote it completely. I always found him to be a bit shifty, never know what might be left in here."

"Sir... it's a Swap() routine..."

"All the more reason! now get to rewriting it! While your at it, make it so we use the Source engine, chop chop. shouldn't be too hard, we're almost done."