While it may not be as life-defining an event as it used to be, your wedding day should always be special. And what's more special than having the gravelly baritone of Jon St. John—the one and only voice of Duke Nukem —declaring you husband and wife. Or husband and husband. Or wife and wife? It's 2019; it's all good.

I'm still torn on whether getting married by Duke Nukem would be a funny story to share with your kids decades later, or a terrible secret to take to the grave, but either way it's a thing that can theoretically happen now, thanks to Jon St. John becoming an ordained minister. Truly, a man of many talents.

He's even confirmed via Twitter that he's willing to switch character. Duke Nukem is all well and good if you're dealing with an alien invasion and/or abducted bikini babes, but not really my go-to for weddings, especially after Duke Nukem Forever. I'd much rather be wed by the eternally blank (but friendly) Big The Cat from Sonic Adventure, one of St. John's lesser-known roles. Or failing that, Mega64's totally unofficial Doug Huggem.

This raises a good few tangential questions. If you could pick any game voice actor to hold your ceremony in character, who would you pick. While Big The Cat would be hilarious, I can't help but feel that Deckard Cain from Diablo would convey the right tone. Just make sure everyone leaves after the rings and smooches are exchanged, no matter how much he asks you to stay a while and listen. Who would you pick?

It's hard to imagine that many games go from design doc to finished product without any twisting and turning along the way—we just don't get to see all the failed prototypes, scrapped levels, and deleted placeholder art. Every now and then, though, we do get a glimpse into the process, sometimes finding that the games we know today once looked very different.

There have surely been many, many mid-development pivots that we never heard anything about, but here are a few we do know about that stick out to us: games that may not have found the same success, or wielded the same influence over PC gaming, had they never made dramatic changes during development.

Splinter Cell Conviction

The original take on Sam Fisher's next adventure was going to be this melee combat-heavy game set in urban locations, and it didn't really look like Splinter Cell. It didn't look like anything, actually, other than a janky old third-person game with someone's dad as the lead character. When Conviction re-emerged it was a very straightforward stealth action game, but it was still a stylish update for Sam Fisher that people actually wanted to play.

Beyond Good & Evil 2

This one isn't even out yet, but at least one version of it has been in the works before—and it wasn't a co-op space game, or whatever the new one is going to be. It looked like a more conventional third-person thing, made in the wake of the Gears games. This doesn't look like much more than a proof of concept, but the project was canned in 2009, when Michel Ancel and his team went to work on Rayman: Origins. It at least reached the stage where Ubisoft were comfortable sharing footage of it in public.

Diablo

Diablo birthed the PC action-RPG as we know it today, but it was originally going to be turn-based—and designer David Brevik wasn't at all interested in changing that. He told Blizzard as much when they approached him with the idea. "What are you guys talking about? Realtime? No, no, no, no, this isn’t one of your strategy games," Brevik recalled himself saying during a 2016 GDC talk. The change came to a vote, and Brevik voted no, but was the only one to do so. And so it was decided: Diablo would be a real-time action RPG.

How did Brevik make the change from turn-based to realtime? It was shockingly simple. "I just made the turns happen 20 times a second, or whatever it was, and it all just kind of worked, magically," he said. "I remember taking the mouse. I clicked on the mouse, and the warrior walked over and smacked the skeleton down. And I was like, ‘Oh my god! ...That was awesome!’ And the sun shone through the window, and god passed by, and the angels sung and sure enough, that was when the ARPG was kinda born, at that moment. And I was lucky enough to be there, it was an amazing, amazing moment, I’ll never forget it."

Borderlands

Borderlands' signature comic-book style wasn't its original look. The change is common knowledge now, but still one of the most dramatic examples (that we've been able to see) of a change in art direction, a tonal adjustment made to stand out from other shooters of the time, namely Fallout 3 and Rage. It obviously worked, and it's hard to imagine Borderlands now as anything other than the goofy, colorful, somewhat messily-inked series it became. The sad side of the story is that, according to a trio of Gearbox leads (as relayed by Gamespot), the original art director quit the job and the industry after having all her work thrown out.

Resident Evil 4

Before it became one of the greatest action games ever made, Resident Evil 4 was a very different game—several times over. Between 2001 and 2004, several iterations of Resident Evil 4 were shown off at Tokyo Game Show and E3. The video above is probably the most well-known, from E3 2003. The graphics and camera are similar to what we'd see in the game that finally hit the GameCube, but Leon's coat model is different, it moves more realistically as he walks, and the lighting is also much moodier. The really big difference, though, is that this version of RE4 had a psychological horror thing going on, with a blue filter appearing over the screen as freaky stuff starts happening. You'll also spot Resident Evil's classic fixed camera angles and the "hook man" enemy this version is sometimes named for.

That version of the game was an evolution of the 2002 iteration, sometimes called "Castle," which had gotten a trailer the year before. None of these ever quite worked out—you can read more about them in this profile of Capcom's Yasuhisa Kawamura, and the struggles with the GameCube hardware that eventually lead Shinji Mikami to come in and direct the version of Resident Evil 4 that was finally released. But the best part of the story is that Resident Evil 4 was, once upon a time, an action game directed by Hideki Kamiya. As it diverged more and more from the survival horror of prior Resident Evils, the project eventually got a new name: Devil May Cry.

Halo

Bungie made its name on the Marathon series of first-person shooters for the Mac, but its more famous shooter series actually started life as a real-time strategy game. This is probably one of the most famous mid-development changes in gaming history, as Microsoft buying Bungie in 2000 was a huge blow to Mac gaming, and eventually the reason the Xbox got off the ground. Back in 1998, Halo looked more like the video above, evolving from a strategy prototype to some kind of third-person shooter before finally becoming the Halo we know today. You can read more about its evolution in our article about Halo's strange history with the PC.

Halo 2's campaign also went through a massive overhaul partway through development, under a brutal deadline, which you can read about in detail in Waypoint's massive oral history of the Halo series.

Fortnite

Technically, Fortnite changed after development, and its original design remains intact and playable. But who's talking about the cooperative game Epic spent years working on when they say 'Fortnite'? Pretty much no one. Fortnite now refers to Fortnite Battle Royale, which borrowed the shooting and building from the original game, but completely overhauled the format to take advantage of the new popularity of last-player-standing battle royale games, namely PUBG. Without that sudden pivot, we probably wouldn't be talking about Fortnite at all today. Some of our readers might prefer that hypothetical timeline, but we don't want to live in a world without intense cube speculation.

Duke Nukem Forever

Duke Nukem Forever is the ultimate tale of development hell. The first footage was unveiled at E3 1998. At that time, it was running on the Quake 2 engine, but that same year 3D Realms switched to the Unreal Engine, and so began the saga. Duke Nukem Forever continued to change over the next few years, switching to a new version of Unreal in the process and later a new physics engine, and publishing rights bounced around until they landed with Take-Two. 

Jump all the way to the late 2000s, and it began to appear like DNF might actually be released—there was even a new trailer in 2007—but in 2009 development was shut down after an argument between 3D Realms and Take-Two over funding. The dev team was laid off, Take-Two and 3D Realms went to court. Though development would continue—including by ex-3D Realms employees—it seemed like DNF would never be released. 

Come 2010, and a surprise re-announcement came at PAX thanks to Gearbox Software, which had helped reignite development and eventually purchased the IP, with 2K remaining publisher. And so Duke Nukem Forever finally released. It was not, however, running on the Quake 2 engine. (It also wasn't very good.)

Had the original development plan been stuck to, DNF would've released sometime in 1998 or 1999. Only a few people truly know what it would've looked like had it been finished then, but had 3D Realms put it out there and made its profit, the shape of PC gaming might be very different today.

Ion Maiden is the new game from 3D Realms being made in the same engine as Duke Nukem 3D, built to play like a first-person shooter from the 1990s. Its so old school its artwork, seen above, is a reference to the box art for the PlayStation edition of Doom. 

You may remember Ion Maiden's protagonist from a previous game, Interceptor Entertainment's top-down ARPG Bombshell, which Ion Maiden is a prequel to (not that you need to have played it first). She's got a history that goes back further than that, however. At one point, Shelly 'Bombshell' Harrison was almost an NPC in Duke Nukem Forever.

She'd been conceived as the star of her own game back in 1997, inspired by Barb Wire (both the Pamela Anderson movie and the comic published by Dark Horse). When that game's creators left 3D Realms the decision was made to have Bombshell instead debut in Duke Nukem Forever, and then get her own spin-off. Early concept art from this period shows a version of the character very much like the 'bad girl' comics popular in the era, like someone straight out of Danger Girl. (Art by Dan Panosian and Paul Richards.)

In 2003, with Duke Nukem Forever still years away, Feng Zhu was hired to redesign the character with a slightly more practical look. But none of these versions of the character would be used in the final game, from which she was completely absent—a blessing in disguise, really.

It wasn't until 2015 that Bombshell was revived for her own game. While those early concepts had her as essentially a sexed-up female version of Duke Nukem, then as an EDF soldier, the next redesign transformed her into a bomb disposal expert—hence the nickname. This design kept the bionic arm that had been part of some of the early concept art, but not much else.

This brings us to 2018 and Ion Maiden, which details Bombshell's early career working for the Global Defence Force, building up to the 'Washington Incident' and the loss of her arm. Here, her look is much more practical, complete with armor. She even wears a helmet sometimes. (Art by Arturo Pahua.)

Finally, as a bonus these facial close-ups by Isabel Alonso, which were repurposed from concept art to become in-game health portrait expressions in the classic Wolfenstein 3D style. 

Ion Maiden's 'preview campaign' is currently available in Early Access, giving you a Shareware-size taste of the finished product.

Despite it being 2018, Duke Nukem might soon get a film adaptation. The news comes via Hollywood Reporter, which reckons actor John Cena is "in negotiations" to star in the film, which has yet to lock in a director or writer. Production company Platinum Dunes – which is operated by Michael Bay – is producing it. T

It seems like odd timing for a Duke Nukem adaptation. Not only did Duke Nukem Forever tank miserably (because it sucked!) but Duke himself feels like a fossil of the 1990s. He recently popped up as a DLC bonus for the Bulletstorm remaster, but aside from that and the most recent in a line of Duke Nukem 3D reissues, he's not been used in any new games.

One could reasonably suspect that this film adaptation may be planned to coincide with a new game. But that's only if we're really unlucky. If there is one, it'd be published by Gearbox, who acquired the property a couple of years ago. 

Whatever the case, John Cena would probably make a good Duke – he looks the part.

I don't know if Duke Nukem Forever is really as bad as the legend that's sprung up around it makes out, but it sure wasn't good. Which is probably why, aside from a little spat with 3D Realms and Interceptor over what eventually became Bombshell (with a heavy emphasis on the bomb, as it turns out), Gearbox has been content to let the franchise lie quietly for the past half-decade. But that may be about to change.

Point yourself at dukenukem.com, lie to the age gate, and you'll be confronted with a Happy 20th Anniversary banner Duke Nukem 3D was released in 1996 a Coming Soon warning, and a countdown that's currently got eight days and change left on the clock. That puts zero hour at 8:30 pm ET on September 2, a date that means... [Update: I originally pegged it at September 1 but it's been pointed out to me that I got it wrong, and September 2 is in fact a date of significance. Gearbox is holding a panel at PAX West that day, which surely can't be a coincidence. The panel is scheduled to run from 4-5 pm PT, while the timer will run out at 5:30 pm PT, so presumably we'll find out what's happening a little bit before it goes live.]

Also of note: The Duke Nukem Facebook page has suddenly come back to life with its first new post since 2012, and a Duke Nukem Twitter account has appeared. Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford is currently bantering with it.

The King is back. Line up, ladies. pic.twitter.com/jiyifNvWzLAugust 24, 2016

There's no guarantee that all of this will end in the announcement of a new game: We could be looking at Duke Nukem Forever DLC, or DNF Gold, or a Duke Anthology of some sort. But that's awfully unlikely. This a lot of effort, relatively speaking, for anything less than a new game reveal, especially since that's so obviously what people are going to expect. I've reached out to Gearbox to ask about what's going on, and while I don't imagine I'll hear back why would they blow their own countdown? I'll let you know if I do.

(Final thing: I couldn't get the site to load properly in Firefox, only in Chrome, so if you run into a you cannot view this website message after entering your birthdate, switch browsers.)

Drinking beer makes you tougher according to the screen prompt when you down a can in Duke Nukem Forever. This is one of many pieces of life advice from video games you re better off ignoring. As well as reducing damage by 75%, drinking beer gives the Duke blurred vision and lingering afterimages, slows down sound so that everyone seems deep underwater, and makes him quote dated bro comedy Old School. All that, and a serious case of the burps, after only a single American beer. Duke Nukem is apparently a total lightweight.

Underwhelming as it sometimes is, I ll try getting drunk in any game that lets me. I feel it s my patriotic duty as an Australian. My Commander Shepherd samples the krogan liquor, my Edward Kenway wakes up in a haycart after three or seven ales, and my Adam Jensen didn t ask for this woozy tilting of the Earth or all the double images, please make it stop. And if there s some kind of bonus involved, like getting health back in Redneck Rampage, all the better.

Games sometimes have odder ideas about the benefits of drinking than simple bonuses to your toughness or health. Drink the right booze in Jade Empire and you can learn martial arts. BioWare s wuxia RPG gives you a companion named Henpecked Hou who is as much a drinking buddy as a member of your fantasy fellowship. When Hou is your companion he casually lobs bottles of wine at you in combat; drinking them allows you to switch to the drunken master style of kung fu just like Jackie Chan. Your stumblebum drunken fist attacks cause a lot of damage, especially the one where you topple over like a tipsy oak, though you have to keep drinking to keep the punch party going.

Sometimes drinking in games has worse consequences than rowdiness or beer goggles though, and I don t mean getting murdered in an alley because you bought Leisure Suit Larry too many drinks in Lefty s Bar. The newer Fallout games model addiction, borrowing the same mechanic they use for harder drugs, so that you can easily get addicted to whichever drink you ve been enjoying too much of, whether for roleplaying reasons or just the temporary stat boosts they provide.

This is why my roguish wasteland gambler in Fallout: New Vegas became not an alcoholic but specifically a whiskey addict. Take the hard-drinking Cass as your companion in New Vegas and you can enjoy the Whiskey Rose perk, which washes away many of the negative side-effects of alcohol and gives bonuses to your damage threshold. Just like in Jade Empire and real life, it s best to drink with a friend. Whiskey Rose only works if you stick to whiskey and wasteland tequila, and you can craft the latter yourself from agave and water. It s practically a health tonic.

There are other consequences to drinking too much beyond addiction, and the one most of us will have to deal with in real life is regrettable decision-making. The Witcher games in particular subject their hero Geralt to plenty of that. In The Witcher 2 a sidequest hidden in the starter town has him deal with the consequences of over-celebrating with a fantasy special forces squad called The Blue Stripes. It begins with some knife-throwing, arm-wrestling, and shit-talking, and soon he s waking up half-dressed on a riverbank with no memory of how he got there and a brand new tattoo on his neck. Geralt s quest briefly stops being something about some kings or whatever and becomes a much more immediate search for answers about what he got up to the night before. This being a Witcher game it predictably involves a brothel.

Geralt then turns to Triss, his sorceress girlfriend, for advice on what to do about his new ink. You can either track down the herbs she needs to perform the medieval fantasy equivalent of laser removal surgery, or put up with having a naked woman with a sword and shield prominently displayed on your neck for all to see. It s exactly the kind of tattoo Geralt would like, to be honest.

But as far as bad choices and lost memories the morning after go, the Dragonborn from Skyrim takes the cake, and then vomits that cake right back up into a bedside bucket. Spend enough time in Skyrim s taverns and you ll have a random encounter with a barfly named Sam Guevenne, who challenges you to a drinking competition. Accept and you wake the next day on the floor of a temple devoted to the goddess of beauty. Not helping with your amnesia or hangover, a priestess harangues you about the mess you and your now-missing drinking buddy made, which you have to clean up before you can begin to get answers about the previous night.

This sets you off on a quest that involves retracing your steps across the country and cleaning up bigger messes, like getting a goat back from the giant you sold it to and retrieving a wedding ring from a hagraven you are apparently now engaged to. This being a Bethesda RPG you could just pass some persuasion checks to skip all the fun stuff like stealing back a goat, and instead people will simply tell you outright what they saw you get up to at one a.m. while giggling, swigging Argonian Ale, and making very loud shushing noises.

At the end of your quest you learn the whole thing was an elaborate prank and that your pal Sam Guevere was actually a demigod of debauchery named Sanguine, but on the plus side you get invited to visit his realm afterward and then given a magic staff. This is a much better ending than the quest for a greasy hangover breakfast and a fizzy drink has ever had for me.

Stories like those are why I like to have a tipple in games when I can. Just like in life, half the point of getting blotto is having something to tell people about on Monday morning. The only game that really portrays the fun of drinking in the moment though, rather than focusing on the morning after, is The Lord Of The Rings Online. Plenty of MMOs give you the screenshakes after a drink, but swig from the Spring Festival brandy kegs in Middle-Earth and the world changes color as you slide from side to side and, if you re playing a Hobbit (and why wouldn t you be?) your character bursts into song. Maybe the songs aren t as bawdy as Geralt s, but there s a pleasantness to staggering through the darkened lanes of the Shire with a song on your lips that no other game captures.

Then you wake up on top of a random mountain suffering from a status effect called Huh? Where s My Pants? But still, it s worth it.

Gearbox Software, Interceptor Entertainment, and 3D Realms "have resolved their differences [and] voluntarily ended all litigation between them," they said in a joint statement confirming the end of their dispute over the ownership of Duke Nukem. But the Dukester hasn't returned to his original home at 3D Realms, as I speculated might happen in May. Instead, he is now fully and completely the property of Gearbox.

The suit was originally filed in early 2014 over Duke Nukem: Mass Destruction, a top-down action-RPG that had been teased but never actually announced. Gearbox claimed that it was the rightful owner of the property, having acquired it in full in 2010, but that 3D Realms "sought to privately convince others that the sale never happened," and thereby embark upon illegitimate licensing deals with other companies.

3D Realms CEO Mike Nielsen denied that claim in the statement, however, saying that the licensing deal with Interceptor was made in good faith. "We never intended to cause any harm to Gearbox or Duke, which is why we immediately ceased development after Gearbox reached out," he said. "To secure the future of Duke, 3D Realms has agreed with Gearbox that a single home serves the IP best. And as big Duke fans, we re excited to see what Gearbox has in store for the King. "

Unfortunately for anyone looking forward to a resumption of work on Duke Nukem Reloaded, Interceptor boss Frederik Schreiber made it clear that's not going to happen. "It was my own decision to pull the plug on Duke Nukem Reloaded, even though we were fully allowed to continue development," he said. "I respect Gearbox for supporting a young developer, and I m glad we can now put this behind us."

The final terms of the settlement were not revealed, but the statement confirms that Gearbox "is the full and rightful owner of the Duke Nukem franchise." That makes it two-for-two in the Duke Nukem lawsuit series: In 2013, 3D Realms sued Gearbox over unpaid Duke Nukem Forever royalties, but later withdrew the suit and issued a public apology.

The likelihood is that, if you played Aliens: Colonial Marines or Duke Nukem Forever, you didn't much care for them. Maybe they were buggy, or maybe they didn't look as good as you expected, or maybe they were just offensive. For a variety of reasons, lots of gamers just did not like them. But Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford insists that he did—and he knows how much that bugs people.

"I liked [Colonial Marines]. And it frustrates the people who didn't to hear me say that," Pitchford said in a long and wide-ranging interview with Eurogamer. "It's almost like they want to hear me say, yeah, it was rubbish. But it would be a lie for me to say it. I actually like, fuck, I like Duke Nukem Forever. I thought it was brilliant. I did! I know I'm not objective. But when I say that you should go, that guy's clearly not objective. Why would you expect me to be objective? Have you ever seen weird, bizarre art you don't even understand? The artist who created it clearly did it for a reason and loved it, you know."

Most of the interview is about the critical and commercial failures of the games, and some of it we've heard before: Pitchford defends against claims that the release version of Colonial Marines didn't look as good a promotional videos by talking about the removal of shattered glass and blood in a sequence that appeared in a pre-release demo, something he'd spoken about previously (and in a very similar fashion) in an interview with IGN. But he makes an interesting point about how the suggestion that those pre-release demos were intentionally misleading is an "absurd premise," because of the relatively small impact they have on the game's overall sales.

"Pre-orders for [Colonial Marines] were sub-150,000 units global. About 130,000 units. The game ended up selling 1.5m. The pre-orders are less than 10 per cent," he said. "And if you build bad will, you have no hope of a tail. So any strategy that's predicated on that is a failed strategy before it begins. That is not a strategy that can ever win. And it's not a strategy that any rational marketer should ever even consider."

I don't agree with Pitchford's assessment that it's all just, like, your opinion, man—which is to say that all opinions on Aliens: Colonial Marines and Duke Nukem Forever are entirely subjective, there was clearly a consensus that they'd fallen short of expectation—but he makes some interesting points. Whether they're enough to change your mind is, well, your opinion.

We actually scored Duke Nukem Forever near the high end of the scale in our review—opinions, am I right?—but the general consensus is that it was not a very good game. But Gearbox isn't giving up on the franchise, and in fact IGN reports that CEO Randy Pitchford said during his keynote at Develop: Brighton that "concept development" on a new Duke Nukem game has already been done. But what Pitchford hopes to do is hook up with another developer, and let it do the heavy lifting.

"I did not acquire the franchise merely so we could all experience Duke Nukem Forever. That was the toll to pay to give Duke a chance," he said. "We ve done some concept development [for a new game] and I think the challenges are there. Gearbox is very busy. I think the faster way is that a correct developer can become interested and we can work with them."

However it ultimately plays out, Pitchford said "the whole industry will turn its head and look" when a new Duke is announced. That's important, he added, because he believes that "getting attention" was one of the biggest challenges facing Duke Nukem Forever.

"For 10 years, these guys promised that it was going to be the greatest game ever right?" he said. "It was legendary in its vaporware status. So it has this particular pole of attention that makes it probably three or four times more famous than Borderlands as a franchise."

If Pitchford's scenario for a new Duke Nukem game sounds familiar, you may be thinking back to the even more disastrous Aliens: Colonial Marines. Pitchford said in a 2012 interview with Gamasutra that Gearbox was handling around 80 percent of the work on the game, but Timegate Studios claimed (via MCV) that it had a much greater role in the development of the game, an assertion repeated by another source to Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Whatever the case, we can only hope that Duke has better luck the second time around.

The Duke Nukem lawsuit between 3D Realms and Gearbox Software has been settled, according to documents recently posted on NeoGAF. The suit was initially filed in February 2014 over Duke Nukem: Mass Destruction, a top-down action-RPG being created by 3D Realms and Interceptor Entertainment.

The game was never officially announced, but it was strongly (very strongly) hinted at on the now-disappeared website AllOutOfGum.com. The trouble arose from the fact that Gearbox had acquired the rights to Duke Nukem in 2010 on the way to releasing Duke Nukem Forever. "Apparently, after selling its Duke Nukem IP rights to Gearbox in 2010, 3DR sought to privately convince others that the sale never happened," Gearbox said in its complaint. "The result is the unauthorized development effort that reportedly exists between 3DR and Interceptor."

According to the documents posted on GAF, the matter was settled with the assistance of a mediator, and may ultimately end with the return of the Duke to his original home at 3D Realms. The filing states that "the Seller may repurchase the Duke IP at a price equal to the Buy-Back," which is framed by various expensive-sounding clauses and conditions; that doesn't mean that 3D Realms is definitely reacquiring the property, or that Gearbox is committed to selling it, but it certainly appears as though an opportunity for the franchise to change hands is on the table. There are also a few images apparently taken from Mass Destruction before work on the game morphed into the upcoming Bombshell.

An Interceptor Entertainment rep said the company could not comment on the matter, while Gearbox has not yet responded to our inquiries.