The gamers were in abuzz last night over some comments from Take-Two executives during a shareholder call. Take2 CEO Rich Roedel erroneously mentioned that the perennially delayed Duke Nukem Forever was using the DOOM3 engine, and before you can say “pepperpots at an ice cream social”, most of the Internet gaming sites posted the news as factual.
Changing 3D rendering engines midway is a titanic pain in the programmers’ collective ass. If this fact was true, would mean even more costly delays for this game.
George Broussard of 3DRealms, the developer of Duke Nukem, mentioned that only one gaming news source, GameSpot, bothered to even double check this decidely improbable piece of news with him or his team. Not that they were any more scrupulous, as Broussard remarked to Shacknews:
“When they ran the story about the engine change, they ended it with “Attempts to contact 3D Realms for comment were unsuccessful as of press time.” The news story was posted 35 minutes after I received an e-mail from them requesting confirmation.
Gamespot, I apologize. Your e-mail came in at 10:04pm and I was working elsewhere in the building. I will try to be more accessible to you in the future.”
Makes you wonder how many other news stories you read every day are completely false, just for the sake of rushing the newsflash out the door.