Not to derail this thread, Mars, but that's a half-truth at best. Where'd you hear
that little nugget, exactly?
A lot of people forget that 3-D Realms used to be a company called Apogee; more forget that Apogee published a little game called
Wolfenstein 3D (the game's so idelibly associated with id Software that few remember the publisher). As you're probably aware, Wolf3D made a fucking
ton of money; so George Broussard and Scott Millar, who at that point pretty much
were Apogee, also made a nontrivial chunk of change.
Duke Nukem 3D was financed
entirely off the back of Apogee's publishing income, made by
seven guys in eighteen months flat...and without a publisher's money, meaning that, after overheads like physical production/distribution and advertising costs were sorted, there was no middleman between 3-D Realms and the proceeds of
three and a half million copies of Duke 3D sold - or the add-on packs they outsourced, or the dozen-or-so entirely unrelated games they licensed the Build engine to. This gave 3DR the financial clout to self-finance development of
Forever as well, other than taking a fairly modest advance from GT Interactive in exchange for them handling shipping and distro chores. Millar and Broussard paid for DNF's development almost entirely with their own money. With
twenty million dollars of their own money. They did eventually capitulate and approach Take-Two Interactive for a couple of mil to finish the game up with, but not until
fucking 2009, by which point, as we all know now, the end was well and truly nigh anyway.
Crikey, that ended up kind of long! There's an excellent article on Wired about the whole fiasco
here, which gives a much more thorough (and pretty fascinating) account of how badly wrong games development can go when you mix overambition with a couple of dump trucks worth of money.
