Duke Nukem Forever/Trivia

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This game has a page about it's (in)famous Development.

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• Banned In Australia:
  • Averted. Incredibly, given Australia's reputation, Duke Nukem Forever will be arriving on Australian shores completely uncensored and unabridged.
  • The game itself wasn't banned in the UK, but they had to change the cover art due to it being illegal to publicly depict smoking in the country. As a result, Duke's cigar was deleted, and his expression changed to a vaguely annoyed look.
• Development Hell / Vaporware: To put it in perspective, everything on this list took less time to make than this. It's finally over.
• Fanwork Ban: To some extent. 2K Games' policy of forbidding the inclusion of modding tools made gamemodding difficult.
• Hey, It's That Voice!:
  • Jon St. John reprises his role as Duke in English.
  • Fumihiko Tachiki provides Duke's Japanese voice for the first time ever in the story of the franchise. This is also considered as Hilarious in Hindsight, since his most famous role was voicing Gendo Ikari, and unlike Duke, not only he wants his girl back, he will bring the end of the world along with her!
  • The Holsom twins are voiced by Eri Kitamura and Yūko Gotō.
• Gearbox To The Rescue: Randy Pitchford (and Gearbox as a whole) deserves a Nobel for going to the rescue of a game which was destined to die.

Randy: "Duke can never die, man."

• Limited Special Collectors' Ultimate Edition: BEHOLD! ^{[dead link]} The Duke Nukem Forever Balls of Steel Edition! Comes with a bust of Duke himself, an artbook with art through the ages, a limited edition comic book, and other such novelties! All for the heart attack causingly low price of $99.99! If you live in the US and are near a Gamestop or have access to Amazon, that is. No actual Balls of Steel included, though.
• No Export for You: Zig-Zagging Trope, the Russian version of the game is a separate Steam entity. Meaning: it is locked out of Steam's usual language-selection options, as well as ANY patches and DLC, both Existing and future, because the localization company and 2K Games cannot settle about whose responsibility it is to adapt them for the locked-down Russian-only release. All the appropriate access and unlock codes are provided, they are simply not compatible with the Russian version.
• Pigeonholed Voice Actor: Jon St. John is reprising, once again, his long-standing role as The Duke himself.
• Promoted Fanboy: Randy Pitchford, who worked on Duke Nukem 3D as a junior developer, states he was (and is) Duke Nukem's biggest fan, and made sure that 3D Realms' game wouldn't die.
• Talking to Himself: Near the beginning of the game Duke gets into a brief argument with an obnoxious tourist sitting on his throne. The obnoxious tourist is also played by Jon St. John, apparently. It seems the guy has a pretty impressive vocal range.
• Troubled Production: 12 years in which the engine was changed, money was spent, insults were thrown, and eventually 3D Realms got bankrupt (George Broussard's reputation too). The game still managed to come out as Gearbox took over.
• Uncancelled: And how!
• What Could Have Been:
  • Forever started as a sidescrolling platform game based on the engine of Alien Rampage and the sprites of Duke Nukem 3D. Said project was scrapped, and the title was used to the sequel to Duke Nukem 3D. An unrelated sidescrolling shooter titled Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project, based on the Prism 3 D engine, was released in 2002.
  • Start with the fact that the game we got only ever got finished because many of the levels were shortened, merged, or just cut out and work from there.
  • Many of the characters, weapons and setpieces seen in the early trailers were not used for the final version. An Action Girl Distaff Counterpart of Duke (Bombshell) and a character named "The Prospector" were both absent from the final game (and were likely cut long before Gearbox got their hands on the game).
  • There were also plans to introduce a mirror universe "NegaDuke".
  • Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw of Zero Punctuation was asked to write the script at one point. The dev team absolutely loved his outcast, but George kept going "Would Duke really do/say this?" and it got scrapped. According to Yahtzee it portrayed Duke as an ironic character and made fun of everyone around him, as he believed it be the best way to reintroduce Duke Nukem to a modern audience. It got scrapped in favor of "Duke played straight in a silly world" that we see now. Yahtzee was given a chance to revise the script to go with this tone, but he didn't because that didn't make any sense to him.