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According to its Web site, Apogee Software “is considered the founder and father of the local Dallas-area game development community,” but it’s no more. The PC shareware developer’s been dead all of a week now, some 12 years after Apogee’s 3D Realms announced development of a video game, Duke Nukem Forever, that to this day remains nothing more than screen shots and a demo reel. The game’s publisher, Grand Theft Auto-maker Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., said last week it was cutting off funding, guesstimated to be in the eight figures — to which 3D Realms co-founder Scott Miller said only today that his company didn’t take a cent.
There’s a good chance the fight over the fate of Duke Nukem Forever will take forever, as it’s now tied up in litigation: Bloomberg News notes that Take-Two has sued Garland-based Apogee in New York State Supreme Court, alleging that “Apogee
repeatedly assured Take-Two and the video-gaming community that
it was diligently working toward competing development of the PC
Version of the Duke Nukem Forever,” while pocketing $12 million and delivering bupkis. Miller’s been little heard from since the shut-down, but at 1:53 a.m. today he surfaced to defend his company: “We didn’t get a penny of that money. This, along with so much else,
is 100% spin, being eaten up by those who have no clue whatsoever. But,
we cannot talk yet. We will, soon…” Shacknews has read the legal docs and reports that “Take-Two is demanding a copy of the Duke Nukem Forever source code.”
