The Evolution of Duke Nukem Forever

We chronicle Duke’s journey from the beginning.

By: Ryan Winterhalter
June 22, 2011

Duke Nukem Forever earned an F on 1UP, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a historically significant game. In fact, its fourteen year stint as vaporware dwarfs its nearest competitors: Prey at ten years, Too Human at nine, and Battlecruiser 3000AD at eight. To put these fourteen years into perspective, three console generations have come and gone in the time it took to produce DNF. Odysseus took less time to get home from the Trojan War. Duke’s development cycle is longer than any war in American history, and longer than The Great Depression.

Obviously, the game conceived of in 1997 bears little resemblance to the DNF we got in 2011 — or does it? We’ve combed through all of the game’s available footage and found certain key sections and ideas that survived through the years. We boiled our findings down to the following video, and you can find large versions of the trailers we used along with our detailed observations below. A word of advice — the video uses a picture-in-picture format so you might want to watch it in full-screen on HD if you can.