3D Realms went from being a $25,000-a-month startup to a $200,000-a-month corporation. It was the first game to let players run around a 3-D first-person environment shooting enemies, and it became a breakout hit, selling 200,000 copies. In 1992, the duo published Wolfenstein 3D, created by a then tiny studio called id Software. They were a study in contrasts: Miller, guarded and quiet, became the savvy business dealer, while Broussard - a voluble, energetic, ponytailed presence who carried around a single notebook as his organizational tool - became the creative impresario, famous for an unerring sense of what was fun. He quit his day job and brought Broussard on. By 1990, he was publishing and marketing titles created by others. When Miller was in his twenties, he invented the shareware model of selling games and formed his company, Apogee (which started going by 3D Realms in 1994): He'd break a game into chunks, release it for free on BBSes, get people addicted, and then charge them for the remaining parts.
They would hang out in the computer lab, programming clunky 2-D and text-adventure games. As one patient fan pointed out, when development on Duke Nukem Forever started, most computers were still using Windows 95, Pixar had made only one movie - Toy Story - and Xbox did not yet exist.īroussard and Miller met in the late '70s in Dallas, during Miller's senior year of high school. But the Duke Nukem Forever team worked for 12 years straight. Normally, videogames take two to four years to build five years is considered worryingly long. Screenshots and video snippets would leak out every few years, each time whipping fans into a lather - and each time, the game would recede from view. The team quickly began work on that sequel, Duke Nukem Forever, and it became one of the most hotly anticipated games of all time. Featuring a swaggering, steroidal, wisecracking hero, Duke Nukem 3D became one of the top-selling videogames ever, making its creators very wealthy and leaving fans absolutely delirious for a sequel. It's the insignia of Duke Nukem 3D, a computer game that revolutionized shoot-'em-up virtual violence in 1996. To videogame fans, that logo is instantly recognizable. They arranged themselves on top of their logo: a 10-foot-wide nuclear-radiation sign, inlaid in the marble floor.
So they headed down to the lobby of their building in Garland, Texas, to smile for the camera. Their team was-finally-giving up, declaring defeat, and disbanding. They were videogame programmers, artists, level builders, artificial-intelligence experts.
On the last day, they gathered for a group photo.
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