“I genuinely appreciate Mr. Nielsen’s and Mr. Schreiber’s statement and sincerely offer my best wishes to Interceptor Entertainment and 3D Realms towards their future success”, the statement reads.
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The court case was a response by Gearbox over its displeasure at 3D Realms announcing Duke Nukem Mass Destruction in early 2014. The problem with this is that 3D Realms sold the Duke Nukem IP to Gearbox when the Texas studio rescued Duke Nukem: Forever from its status as vapourware back in 2011.
CEO of Interceptor Entertainment, Frederik Schreiber, also commented, stating “I’m really happy that the lawsuit between Gearbox, 3DR, and Interceptor has come to an end”. The battle is over and Gearbox has emerged as the “full and rightful” owner of the Duke Nukem license. Interceptor then announced that it meant to develop a Duke Nukem game, “Duke Nukem: Mass Destruction“, based on the characters, content and intellectual property Gearbox claimed it owned.
“We never intended to cause any harm to Gearbox or Duke, which is why we immediately ceased development after Gearbox reached out”, he added.
On the bright side, we still have Bombshell, which features female protagonst Shelly “Bombshell” Harrison from the Duke Nukem universe; the game is set to drop sometime in late 2015. They recently said that they’ve done some “concept development” but are too busy to pursue the project on their own. It also said it had notified Gearbox in 2012 and 2013 about the development of the game and received no opposition. Interceptor and 3D Realms, meanwhile, are working on an isometric action RPG called Bombshell.
Duke Nukem now officially has a home.
At this year’s Develop Conference in Brighton, UK, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford said that he’d be open to the idea of a new Duke Nukem game. “That was, sort of, the toll to pay to give Duke Nukem a chance at a future”.
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However, he admitted that Gearbox would probably need to rope in development support from another studio.
