3D Realms | Code Like It's 198x

When Edge visited the suburbs of Dallas in the summer of 1995, George Broussard was showing off a game in which Duke Nukem could walk over bridges, swim underwater, see himself in mirrors and ride an underground train. “The main advantages the Build engine has over something like Doom,” he said, “are that you can walk over bridges, have true rooms above rooms, swim underwater, have mirrors on the walls … look up and down, duck, crawl, jump, fly.” His company, 3D Realms, had been set up by the shareware publisher Apogee for exactly this kind of game. A year later Duke Nukem 3D made it famous. The same company then spent twelve years, and by one estimate tens of millions of dollars, on a sequel it never finished.

Fast facts

Began: 1994, as Apogee Software’s label for 3D games; the name of the whole company from 1996.
Run by: George Broussard (president) and Scott Miller, who had founded Apogee in 1987.
Base: Garland, near Dallas, Texas; from 2014, Aalborg, Denmark.
Engine: Build, written by Ken Silverman, also licensed to other studios.
Games: Terminal Velocity (1995, developed by Terminal Reality), Duke Nukem 3D (1996), Shadow Warrior (1997); it backed Max Payne (2001) and Prey (2006).
Duke Nukem Forever: in development from 1997, halted in 2009, finished by Gearbox Software and released in 2011.

Apogee’s 3D offshoot

3D Realms was not a new company so much as a new name for Apogee’s new direction. Apogee had built its business on the “Apogee Model”, giving away the first episode of a game as shareware and selling the rest, and had used it to publish id Software’s Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D. When id published Doom itself, Apogee needed 3D games of its own. Edge described 3D Realms in 1995 as “the new-software arm of shareware giant Apogee”, launched “as an offshoot of Apogee” for 3D development. Broussard was its president, and Miller its vice-president and, “confusingly, Apogee’s co-president”. The whole story of Apogee, from Kroz to Rise of the Triad, is told in the Apogee Software entry.

The first game under the new name, the flying shooter Terminal Velocity (1995), came from an outside developer, Terminal Reality. The engine that mattered was Build, written, Edge said, “single-handedly by teenage programming genius Ken Silverman”. 3D Realms planned to ship its level editor with its games, Broussard explained, “as we want to encourage players to design their own levels and circulate them freely”, something Doom’s players could only do with id’s data formats. Alongside Duke Nukem 3D, Edge saw two more Build games under way at 3D Realms that summer: Shadow Warrior, set in “an Oriental fortress populated by shuriken-wielding Ninjas”, and Blood, a gothic horror game in which the player could combine an aerosol with a cigarette lighter to make a flamethrower.

Duke Nukem 3D and the Build games

Duke Nukem 3D came out as shareware in 1996, and in May Computer Gaming World wrote that Doom’s reign had “suddenly been challenged”. Its interactivity was the point: in the demonstration Edge saw, a rocket fired through a window on a moon base depressurised the room and sucked out the aliens, and Duke himself if the player did not shut the door in time. At the E3 show that May, GT Interactive announced that it would distribute Apogee’s games, ending, as PC Gamer put it, “US Gold’s rocky relationship with the shareware supremo”. Later in 1996 the company dropped the Apogee name and traded as 3D Realms.

Build spread beyond the company. Capstone’s Witchaven (1995) was, Computer Gaming World noted, “the first game to use 3D Realms’ Build engine”, and Xatrix used it for Redneck Rampage. Blood moved to Monolith Productions and came out in 1997 through GT Interactive, its advertisements noting that “this game uses the Build engine and tools by Ken Silverman”.

Shadow Warrior followed in 1997, with a ninja hero named Lo Wang. It drew some of the sharpest criticism the company received. In Computer Gaming World in August 1997, Elliott Chin called it “patently offensive in its racial humor”: a white actor playing the hero in a “thickly accented voice”, fortune cookies for health, and zombies in coolie hats, which he pointed out were associated with Chinese, not Japanese, workers. Readers’ letters in later issues argued both ways.

In 1998 3D Realms became one of the founding members of Gathering of Developers, a publishing co-operative set up by Mike Wilson to give developers more of the profits, alongside Epic MegaGames, Ritual Entertainment, Terminal Reality and PopTop Software. Its biggest outside project was Max Payne, by the Finnish studio Remedy Entertainment, which 3D Realms funded through four and a half years of development; in 2002 Take-Two bought the Max Payne brand from Remedy and Apogee. Prey, which Tom Hall had described in 1996 as “a virtual movement that will take over the world”, passed to Human Head Studios, which rebuilt it between 2000 and 2005; it came out in 2006, published by 2K Games.

Duke Nukem Forever

The name Duke Nukem Forever appeared early. At the same E3 show in 1996 GT Interactive said it would ship it, and PC Gamer reported that it would not, “as everyone thought, be the big 3D sequel to Duke, but instead a 2D platform game”. The game that kept the name was the 3D sequel. By the end of 1997 Computer Gaming World’s release list expected it from Apogee/3D Realms in summer 1998, built on id’s Quake II engine.

In 1998 Broussard, the project leader, switched to Epic’s Unreal engine, because, he told Computer Gaming World, the direction the team wanted to go “could be better achieved” with it. He expected the move to cost “about a month to six weeks”, and the magazine gave a release date of the first quarter of 1999. The engine changed again later, and the dates kept slipping. In 2011 Edge recalled a reported joke in the office that staff should stop Broussard playing new games, “because he’d invariably want to implement their features”. Randy Pitchford, who had built four of Duke Nukem 3D’s levels before leaving in 1997 and was by 2010 president of Gearbox Software, estimated that the project burned “between 20 and 30 million dollars” of Broussard’s own money.

In May 2009 3D Realms, out of money, stopped work on the game and laid off its development team. Take-Two, which held the publishing rights, sued it that month for failing to deliver the game. Pitchford then stepped in: with the approval of 3D Realms’ owners he bought the Duke Nukem franchise, Edge reported, “then mediated with 2K to dismantle the lawsuits”, and took on eight former 3D Realms staff who had carried on working on the game at home, as a team called Triptych Games. Gearbox showed the game at the Penny Arcade Expo in September 2010, and it came out in June 2011 for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, fourteen years after work began.

It was not worth the wait. Edge gave it 3 out of 10 and called it “an awkward botch of a game worth playing exactly once”, its borrowings from Halo and Half-Life laid down in layers over a game whose weapons had been “imported, without tweaking, from 1996”.

Later history

With Duke sold, 3D Realms kept its name and little else. In March 2014 SDN Invest, part-owner of the Danish developer Interceptor Entertainment, bought the company, and it moved to Aalborg in Denmark. It returned as a publisher of new games made to look and play like those of the 1990s: Bombshell (2016); Ion Fury (2019), made by Voidpoint on the Build engine; and WRATH, built on the original Quake engine with KillPixel Games. “The idea was to be authentic to the era we are trying to replicate,” Miller told Wireframe in 2020. Ion Fury was first called Ion Maiden, and changed its name in 2019 after the band Iron Maiden took legal action over it.

In August 2021 Embracer Group bought 3D Realms through its subsidiary Saber Interactive, and when Embracer sold Saber in March 2024, 3D Realms went with it. Miller and Terry Nagy had already bought back the Apogee name in April 2021; the next year Miller wrote that the 3D Realms of today “no longer has any link to the past, other than in name only”.

Sources

Edge issue 24, September 1995, pp. 36–38, 3D Realms studio feature: Apogee’s offshoot for 3D games, Broussard and Miller’s titles, Terminal Velocity and Terminal Reality, the Build engine and Ken Silverman, the Build features quotation, the moon-base demonstration, the level editor, Shadow Warrior and Blood in development.
Ken Brown, “Duking It Out”, Computer Gaming World issue 142, May 1996: Duke Nukem 3D challenging Doom.
PC Gamer (UK) issue 32, July 1996, p. 47, E3 report: Apogee signing with GT Interactive, and Duke Nukem Forever announced as a 2D platform game.
Peter Olafson, review of Witchaven II, Computer Gaming World issue 146, September 1996: the first Witchaven, released the previous year, as “the first game to use 3D Realms’ Build engine”. Issue 152, March 1997: Redneck Rampage on the Build engine. Issue 154, May 1997: Blood advertisement (Monolith Productions, GT Interactive, “the Build engine and tools by Ken Silverman”).
Elliott Chin, “3D Realms’ Folly”, Computer Gaming World issue 157, August 1997: the criticism of Shadow Warrior. Readers’ letters, issue 159, October 1997.
Computer Gaming World issue 161, December 1997: release list, Duke Nukem Forever, Apogee/3D Realms, summer 1998. Issue 167, June 1998: Broussard as project leader, the Quake II engine. Issue 170, September 1998: the switch to the Unreal engine, Broussard’s estimate of the delay, the first-quarter 1999 date.
“Game On for GoD”, Edge issue 57, April 1998: Gathering of Developers and its founding members, Duke Nukem Forever and Prey still to be published by GT Interactive.
Edge issue 151, July 2005: Prey from 3D Realms/Human Head, published by 2K Games. Edge issue 166, September 2006: Prey’s history, Tom Hall’s 1996 quotation, Human Head’s work from 2000 to 2005.
For Max Payne and Take-Two’s purchase of the brand, see the Remedy Entertainment entry and its sources.
News feature on Gearbox and Duke Nukem Forever (“Former magician Randy Pitchford reveals his greatest trick yet”), Edge issue 222, Christmas 2010: Pitchford’s levels for Duke Nukem 3D and departure in 1997, his estimate of Broussard’s spending, the dispute with Take-Two, his purchase of the franchise, Triptych Games, the Penny Arcade Expo showing.
Nick Breckon, “Take-Two Sues 3D Realms for Failing to Deliver Duke Nukem Forever”, Shacknews, 14 May 2009 (web, secondary): the breach of contract suit. https://www.shacknews.com/article/58642/take-two-sues-3d-realms
Review of Duke Nukem Forever, Edge issue 230, August 2011, pp. 102–104: developers 3D Realms, Triptych Games, Gearbox Software and Piranha Games, publisher 2K Games; “an awkward botch”, the weapons from 1996. Edge issue 232, October 2011: the 3/10 score, the halt in 2009, the engine changes and the office joke. Edge issue 227, May 2011: fourteen years in development.
“Can I Play With Fury”, Wireframe issue 19, July 2019: Iron Maiden’s legal action and the change of name to Ion Fury.
Wireframe issue 42, August 2020, pp. 28–31: Ion Fury on the Build engine, WRATH on the Quake engine with KillPixel Games, Scott Miller’s quotation.
“3D Realms” and “Duke Nukem Forever”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): the 1994 label and 1996 change of name, the halt on 6 May 2009, the release dates of 10 and 14 June 2011, SDN Invest’s purchase in March 2014 and the move to Aalborg, Bombshell, the Embracer and Saber purchase in August 2021 and the sale of Saber in March 2024, Miller’s 2022 statement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Realms and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_Forever