Johnny Dukem Preys for Star Wars
Turbo Overkills Duke
I love how so many players and press compare the bad assery of Johnny Turbo with another of Apogee's most famous games, Duke Nukem 3D. Here's a sampling of what players and press have written:
"Reminiscent of Duke Nukem in the best way possible."
"Hail to the chainsaw leg, baby!"
"If you love old school shooters like Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D, you'll enjoy Turbo Overkill."
"Ultimate crossover of Duke Nukem, DOOM, Blade Runner and Dredd."
"Reminds me of Duke Nukem 3D, spun with Ultrakill + Doom Eternal mechanics."
"Recaptures the magic of the Boomer Shooters [like] Duke Nukem 3D, Doom, Wolfenstein, Shadow Warrior, and Blood to mention just a few of the iconic nineties first person shooters that represent a simpler time in gaming."
"Duke Nukem only wishes he could claim such bad assery."
“While the Duke is locked away in the Gearbox Mines, the team at Apogee has managed to recreate that attitude in a modern setting with one of the most satisfying first-person shooters on the market.”
To us at Apogee, it really feels great to see one of our old classics being used to praise our future classic.
Turbo's Roadmap
And speaking of Turbo Overkill, we now have a roadmap on our Steam page showing the next stages of development and how we're planning all of the early access updates. A lot of great stuff coming.
Below the Stone update
This game has been mostly off the radar, but it's one I'm super excited about because of how it's coming together. A lot of time has been spent on getting several of the key gameplay systems in place, and when it all comes together this game will finally show its true potential. This will be on display at PAX West and I can't wait for players to give it a try.
We're working on the game's first illustration now, and it's going to be based on one of these concepts:
And here's another fun test screen, showing a sampling of the many plants that will populate certain biomes of the game.
And if that wasn’t enough, here’s a 40-second clip of some cool in-game action! We’re super proud of how Below the Stone is coming together.
Prey: The Star Wars connection!
The Gamer posted a fun article about the 10 best PC-only old school FPS games. Apogee was nicely represented with four games we were involved with--Shadow Warrior, Rise of the Triad, Blood and Prey--and I really loved what the author wrote about Prey, in particular.
For Apogee, Prey was truly meant to be an ambitious game on many fronts, such as using the most recent Id engine at the time, heavily modifying it to allow for portals and changing gravity directions, and the game had a Cherokee protagonist and we did our best to give Tommy a respectful background and story.
An interesting part of this is that after I came up with the basic story, which was based on the hero's journey structure combined with the two-goal structure*, I talked to Gary Whitta about writing the game's full script. Gary had previously been the editor of PC Gamer, and had recently left to try his hand as a writer. The script he wrote for Prey, I thought, was totally amazing and exceeded my best hopes. It really helped flesh out and guide Tommy's journey throughout the game.
If you've not heard of Gary, he later wrote his breakout hit, Book of Eli (starring Denzel Washington), and then he wrote Rogue One, Disney-era's best Star Wars film so far, IMO.
And finally...
3D Realms is NOT the 3D Realms of old
A recent TechRaptor article about a coming 3D Realms game, Cultic (which looks really great btw!), started off by saying:
"Few companies have as much experience as 3D Realms when it comes to retro first-person shooters. Names like Duke Nukem and Shadow Warrior are synonymous with the legendary developer, and that legacy is carried on today as 3D Realms creates and publishers new titles."
Here's the problem: the current 3D Realms’ owners/leaders had no part at all in our past legacy of hit games. The legendary developer this article actually refers to with all of this experience is Apogee.
If you look at the Credits section of Duke Nukem 3D, Max Payne, Shadow Warrior, Prey, Commander Keen or any of Apogee's other games from our golden era, you will not see the names of the new/current owners of 3D Realms. They have no personal stories from back then and they weren't part of the development of these famous games. They were never part of the company during this golden era. In fact, I sold the rights to all of our hit games many years ago, including the rights to Duke (Gearbox), Descent (Interplay), Max Payne (Rockstar), Shadow Warrior (Devolver), Prey (Zenimax), and Blood (Monolith). The current Apogee is the only company with founders/owners/producers who were involved in the making of all of these games. And yes, we're legitimately proud of our legacy, as we should be. So it's a real head-scratcher for me to see misleading tweets like this one:
* A great example of the two-goal story is the original 1977 Star Wars. Goal one is to rescue the princess. Once that's done, goal two kicks in: destroy the Death Star.
