For more than ten hilarious years, Duke Nukem Forever has been — to game nerds — a most marvelous on-going joke of a game, so fabled and so outdated that many wondered if it would only ever exist in alternative dimensions where dinosaurs lived on and you have a beard/don’t have a beard. However, earlier today we discovered that this most cherished gag may come to an end earlier than we think.

Of course, 3DRealms, the original studio, are long since gone since that’s what happens when you don’t release things for extended periods of time. Now being handled by Gearbox, makers of Borderlands and Half-Life expansions, the Forever of forever’s time may hit shelves as early as May 3rd of this year. If all things go well, of course, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves on this one. To accompany the announcement, the first official trailer has dropped on YouTube, with plenty of cigars, sports cars, school girls, strippers and Halo pastiche to pass around to the whole class. And that’s about all I can decipher, since the computer I’m on doesn’t have sound so I could be missing a lot. Actually, you know what? I am probably not missing much.

Click here to view the embedded video.

From what I see the game looks fun, but it was nothing too revolutionary. Duke Nukem never really about pushing barriers, people liked it because it was always about blowing shit up and cracking one-liners.  I just wonder if 3D Realms had been more forthcoming with screenshots and videos of the game, maybe public interest would not have waned the way it did—and maybe 2K Games would have kept funding the development. Changing the engine and technology the game was being developed on so many times didn’t help either. If only George Broussard weren’t so obsessed with Pogs, we might have been playing this game 5 years ago.

After years in development, it would seem that the world-famous vapourware game Duke Nukem Forever will remain just that. 3D Realms, the developer responsible for Duke Nukem Forever is yet another apparent victim of the recession. The studio announced today that it would be shutting down. 3D Realms found themselves in the situation of being forever in development and not publishing any games on a regular basis. If you’re a developer with this business model, you might want to reconsider the way you run your business.

Duke Nukem Developer 3D Realms Shuts Down @ ShackNews

2K Games still own the rights to Forever, so it would seem that Duke Nukem’s days with 3D Realms are numbered—a real shame since I was really looking forward to this game in 1997. 3D Realms, formerly known as Apogee Software, was responsible for developing many classic PC shareware titles, including Wolfenstein 3D, Commander Keen, and Rise of the Triad.

Way to go George Broussard! Todd Replogle is spinning in his grave.