You may remember that we reported on rumors that Duke Nukem Forever won’t be the end of the franchise as long as Gearbox has anything to do with it, but there wasn’t any real evidence to back up the rumor. Now, however, Gearbox Software co-founder, Randy Pitchford, has made a comment that certainly fuels the Duke Nukem reboot fire.
During a Gearbox Software panel at last weekend’s PAX Prime, Pitchford was asked if he disagreed with the critical bashing of Duke Nukem Forever. “It’s such a polarizing thing,” said Pitchford. “There was this one guy that mapped out the different review scores. Here’s the number of people who gave it a zero to 10. And here’s the number of people who gave it 11-20, 21-30, and so on and so forth. And most games have a perfect bell curve, you know, where the center of the curve is the average score. Duke had two curves. There were people who panned it and there were people who kind of liked it.”
Pitchford admitted that he had no idea what to expect when Gearbox acquired the rights to work on Duke Nukem Forever, even going as far as saying he expected a “trainwreck.” “I hope some people kind of enjoyed it,” Pitchford said. “When I dug through all the stuff that 3D Realms had done, I expected a trainwreck and I was actually quite pleased. I had a lot of fun with it. It was fun for me, and I’m really glad that we not only rescued the franchise but took the time to make sure the world could see what those guys had been doing for all of those years. And I’m also proud of the things we added to it. I think we did some things to make it a little better.”
Then, Randy Pitchford put his hype-man hat on and gave the fans in the room just enough to leave them wanting more. “I know that you guys figured out that, when Gearbox acquired the franchise, we didn’t do it just to make sure we could all play Duke Forever, but because we wanted to make our own Duke game,” said Pitchford. “Soon, we’ll talk about that, but not today.”
According to the source article, that small tease was enough to cause the crowd to let out a cheer. If this panel, and the game’s high sales, are any indication, there is still very much a market for Duke Nukem. If any team can revitalize The King, Gearbox, the team behind Borderlands, certainly has a good shot of doing it. Stay tuned for more information as we see if Randy Pitchford’s tease has any substance behind it.
[via Kotaku]
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