Fan-made Duke Nukem game gets Gearbox's blessing

Duke Nukem remake

Duke Nukem: Next Gen is a fan made project that aims to remake the original Duke Nukem 3D in the Unreal 3 Engine, and it's being built with the support of the game's publishers and developers. Read on to discover how the modders convinced Take Two to greenlight the game.

In the blog post announcing the game, project lead Frederick "Fresch" Schreiber describes how he got permission to make the project. His first tactic was to send screenshots of his work in process to creators of the Original Duke Nukem 3D, George Brussard and Scott Miller "The shots managed to convince Scott Miller to a certain degree" he says, "But the project was only doable if Take-Two would approve it."

His next step was to head straight to Duke Nukem Forever developers, Gearbox "thinking that Gearbox might have a better relationship to Take-Two, than 3Drealms, I contacted AdamF, who passed me through to P J Putnam, Vice President and General Counsel of Gearbox Software. Luckily Gearbox was interested in supporting the project, which resulted in a personal non-commercial license to Duke Nukem.”

It's still a work in progress, but Fresch has already got a team together, and is working on getting a multiplayer prototype ready for public release as soon as possible. Check out the video below for the first footage of this darker but much shinier remake.

Tom Senior

Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.