It's official!

As part of the upcoming big-box physical release of Ion Maiden, the game will be released on physical media... On real modified floppies!

Here's a sneak peek;



https://youtu.be/f72fc4hBrrs

It's official!

As part of the upcoming big-box physical release of Ion Maiden, the game will be released on physical media... On real modified floppies!

Here's a sneak peek;



https://youtu.be/f72fc4hBrrs

As many of you know, Bombshell is not a new character.

She was originally concieved back in the mid '90s, before the development of Duke Nukem Forever began. Back then, she started her journey towards a character as fan fiction in the Command & Conquer universe.

Not quickly thereafter, she developed into a new character for Duke Nukem Forever, but never made it into the final game.

Originally, she was going to be based off Pamela Anderson, from the movie "Barb Wire". A counterpart to Duke Nukem, with a heavy emphasis on her attitude towards Duke.


The first concepts of Shelly were drawn in 1997, and had a heavy emphasis on sexualization, which was very common in the mid-nineties;












In 1998 Bombshell was re-drawn again, this time by Dan Panosian. The design was slightly more stylized, but still with a heavy emphasis on sex.















In 1999 - 2001, she got another range of designs by Paul Richards, with some having a closer resemblance to the current version of Shelly. For instance, in one instance she had a bionic arm, while in another she was a bomb defusal expert. This was still the late '90s.



















































Paul Richards also did a few colorized version of his Bombshell artwork in 2000:










In 2003 we hired the legendary artist Feng Zhu to design a new interpretation of Bombshell.

This iteration was focused more on a tactical look:








2009 marked the final appearance of Bombshell in a game related to Duke Nukem. At this point she was still meant to be included in Duke Nukem Forever, but was shortly scrapped afterwards.

In this interation, Bombshell, was simply an EDF Soldier:




2015 marked the year of the return of Bombshell - This time in her very first appearance in a game.

In terms of her design, we had decided to take her in a completely new direction. We wanted to create something brand new. We kept some old ideas, like her bionic arm, and her background as a bomb defusal expert:
















And here we are!

In 2018, Bombshell returned to her FPS roots, starring in her very own First Person Shooter - Ion Maiden. As a prequel to Bombshell, before she lost her arm in the Washington Incident, we wanted to focus more on a different set or armor for the character. At this point, Bombshell is still working for the GDF, which we wanted to emphasize in her new look:








Someone asked a question in the comments, and 3DR Founder Scott Miller gave this reply:


>>> Any information on the standalone Bombshell game 3D Realms was working on in the 90s? <<<

Sure. We had a small internal team, lead by engine coder, Billy Zelsnack and his brother, Jason, who were working on a fully 3D game in 1997, starring a female hero. It was going to be a war game, and your female character was a bit of a female Rambo. The two Zelsnack's had the idea of calling the game Bitch, and I put thought into coming up with a better name.

A month or two later, while watching the film, Barbwire, the ending credits had a generic "bombshell" character, and it immediately clicked that Bombshell could be a very cool name for the game, in place of Bitch.

The Zelsnack brothers left 3D Realms soon after, though, to start their own studio, and that's when I convinced my partner George that Bombshell should have a role in Duke Nukem Forever, with the idea of establishing her in that game, then giving her a spin-off game of her own.

As many of you know, Bombshell is not a new character.

She was originally concieved back in the mid '90s, before the development of Duke Nukem Forever began. Back then, she started her journey towards a character as fan fiction in the Command & Conquer universe.

Not quickly thereafter, she developed into a new character for Duke Nukem Forever, but never made it into the final game.

Originally, she was going to be based off Pamela Anderson, from the movie "Barb Wire". A counterpart to Duke Nukem, with a heavy emphasis on her attitude towards Duke.


The first concepts of Shelly were drawn in 1997, and had a heavy emphasis on sexualization, which was very common in the mid-nineties;












In 1998 Bombshell was re-drawn again, this time by Dan Panosian. The design was slightly more stylized, but still with a heavy emphasis on sex.















In 1999 - 2001, she got another range of designs by Paul Richards, with some having a closer resemblance to the current version of Shelly. For instance, in one instance she had a bionic arm, while in another she was a bomb defusal expert. This was still the late '90s.



















































Paul Richards also did a few colorized version of his Bombshell artwork in 2000:










In 2003 we hired the legendary artist Feng Zhu to design a new interpretation of Bombshell.

This iteration was focused more on a tactical look:








2009 marked the final appearance of Bombshell in a game related to Duke Nukem. At this point she was still meant to be included in Duke Nukem Forever, but was shortly scrapped afterwards.

In this interation, Bombshell, was simply an EDF Soldier:




2015 marked the year of the return of Bombshell - This time in her very first appearance in a game.

In terms of her design, we had decided to take her in a completely new direction. We wanted to create something brand new. We kept some old ideas, like her bionic arm, and her background as a bomb defusal expert:
















And here we are!

In 2018, Bombshell returned to her FPS roots, starring in her very own First Person Shooter - Ion Maiden. As a prequel to Bombshell, before she lost her arm in the Washington Incident, we wanted to focus more on a different set or armor for the character. At this point, Bombshell is still working for the GDF, which we wanted to emphasize in her new look:








Someone asked a question in the comments, and 3DR Founder Scott Miller gave this reply:


>>> Any information on the standalone Bombshell game 3D Realms was working on in the 90s? <<<

Sure. We had a small internal team, lead by engine coder, Billy Zelsnack and his brother, Jason, who were working on a fully 3D game in 1997, starring a female hero. It was going to be a war game, and your female character was a bit of a female Rambo. The two Zelsnack's had the idea of calling the game Bitch, and I put thought into coming up with a better name.

A month or two later, while watching the film, Barbwire, the ending credits had a generic "bombshell" character, and it immediately clicked that Bombshell could be a very cool name for the game, in place of Bitch.

The Zelsnack brothers left 3D Realms soon after, though, to start their own studio, and that's when I convinced my partner George that Bombshell should have a role in Duke Nukem Forever, with the idea of establishing her in that game, then giving her a spin-off game of her own.

Whoa!

What a great few weeks.
The entire team has been absolutely stoked by all the great feedback on the reveal and launch of the Ion Maiden Preview Campaign.

The game is currently at a 97% Steam rating, which completely blew us away!
We knew we had something great on our hands, but we were completely taken by surprise with all the positive feedback we've gotten so far.

The team is hard at work on the full version of Ion Maiden, and while that's still some months ahead of us, we've also been working hard on the first official update to the Ion Maiden Preview Campaign, which is available NOW!

It's based on a lot of feedback we've gathered from you guys over the last few weeks.

Enjoy!

Ion Maiden Preview Campaign Update 1 Changelog:

Important Notes:
User data is now stored in "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Ion Maiden Preview Campaign" on Windows and "~/.config/maiden" on Linux.
The save format version number has been bumped, meaning your old saves will no longer work. This may happen repeatedly during the Early Access period.

Changelog:

• Overall Performance Boosts!
  
• An occasional crash when performing random actions, including flipping lightswitches, has been fixed.
  
• A bug that would cause the player to sometimes switch to the wrong game mode when loading a game has been fixed.
  
• Optimizations to the game world logic have been made to improve performance in some circumstances and shrink savegame file sizes.
  
• Mouse aiming has been reworked to allow much greater precision of movement.
  
• The mouse axis scale sliders can now go all the way to zero.
  
• New "save setup" menu, allowing autosaves to be disabled and a limit to be set on the maximum number of autosaves to keep at any one time.
  
• Savegames can now be deleted with the Delete key.
  
• Keyboard bindings for aiming up, down, and returning the view to the center can now be configured.
  
• A key or button can now be assigned to switch to the player's previously selected weapon.
  
• The sizes and brightness of certain pickup items have been increased
  Armor fragments are now more visible.
  
• Awkward delay after SMG reload has been fixed.
  
• The easiest skill level should now be easier, and the hardest should now be harder
  
• Volume slider no longer treats 50% as 0%

Whoa!

What a great few weeks.
The entire team has been absolutely stoked by all the great feedback on the reveal and launch of the Ion Maiden Preview Campaign.

The game is currently at a 97% Steam rating, which completely blew us away!
We knew we had something great on our hands, but we were completely taken by surprise with all the positive feedback we've gotten so far.

The team is hard at work on the full version of Ion Maiden, and while that's still some months ahead of us, we've also been working hard on the first official update to the Ion Maiden Preview Campaign, which is available NOW!

It's based on a lot of feedback we've gathered from you guys over the last few weeks.

Enjoy!

Ion Maiden Preview Campaign Update 1 Changelog:

Important Notes:
User data is now stored in "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Ion Maiden Preview Campaign" on Windows and "~/.config/maiden" on Linux.
The save format version number has been bumped, meaning your old saves will no longer work. This may happen repeatedly during the Early Access period.

Changelog:

• Overall Performance Boosts!
  
• An occasional crash when performing random actions, including flipping lightswitches, has been fixed.
  
• A bug that would cause the player to sometimes switch to the wrong game mode when loading a game has been fixed.
  
• Optimizations to the game world logic have been made to improve performance in some circumstances and shrink savegame file sizes.
  
• Mouse aiming has been reworked to allow much greater precision of movement.
  
• The mouse axis scale sliders can now go all the way to zero.
  
• New "save setup" menu, allowing autosaves to be disabled and a limit to be set on the maximum number of autosaves to keep at any one time.
  
• Savegames can now be deleted with the Delete key.
  
• Keyboard bindings for aiming up, down, and returning the view to the center can now be configured.
  
• A key or button can now be assigned to switch to the player's previously selected weapon.
  
• The sizes and brightness of certain pickup items have been increased
  Armor fragments are now more visible.
  
• Awkward delay after SMG reload has been fixed.
  
• The easiest skill level should now be easier, and the hardest should now be harder
  
• Volume slider no longer treats 50% as 0%

It all started late in 1993, several months after Apogee and Id Software released Wolfenstein 3D to the world. Id's 3D engine was groundbreaking, and showed the gaming world that fast real-time 3D games were possible.

Ken Silverman was one of the lone coders inspired by Id's game, and at 17 years of age he set about to creative similar technology, and in 1992 he released a game called Ken's Labyrinth. It was less a game, and more of a demo, showing that it wasn't just the geniuses at Id who could pull off fast 3D gaming technology.

Ken contacted us and we discussed working on a project together. I mentioned that I could put together a team to use his engine. But a few months went on and Ken then presented us with a demo of his Build engine, which was would be similar to the engine he knew that Id was creating for their coming game, Doom. He didn't really have a name for the engine, but his execution file was called, build.exe. And somehow this stuck as the name for his engine.



So, in August 1993 we had an employment agreement with Ken, and an exclusive license to use his Build engine on numerous projects.

John Carmack was interviewed and asked back in the 90's, who he thought were the best 3D coders other than himself. He said, "If I had to pick who I think is just the most talented, it would probably be Ken Silverman, the guy that did the Build engine. He does engines and tools. He writes all the code for everything, and he's just extremely talented."

3D Realms knew we had an amazing partnership with Ken, and we did all we could to maximize the use of the Build engine, creating Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior internally, co-funding and co-designing Blood, and licensing the engine to several other studios to make games. I think some 8-10 Build engine games came out all told.

The Build engine was truly the pinnacle of the 2.5D game engine period, which was kicked off with Id's Doom engine. Build went well beyond the features of Doom, with sloping features, partial looking up & down, rooms above rooms, and several other innovations.

Now, 20+ years later, we're super excited to be go back to our roots and use this incredible landmark of engine technology again. The Build engine, while not the most graphically gorgeous, is fast and allows for a gameplay style that hardly seen this century, with gun-blazing gameplay in wide-open multi-path levels that seem to go on forever. On today's tech, we can push the Build engine in ways that just weren't doable in the 90's, and so we're finding refreshing ways that this engine actually outperforms some modern engines, and bring back a style a gameplay that many gamers have long missed.

What's old becomes new again, and the early success of Ion Maiden seems to show we struck the right chord. It's like the 90's are back!

It all started late in 1993, several months after Apogee and Id Software released Wolfenstein 3D to the world. Id's 3D engine was groundbreaking, and showed the gaming world that fast real-time 3D games were possible.

Ken Silverman was one of the lone coders inspired by Id's game, and at 17 years of age he set about to creative similar technology, and in 1992 he released a game called Ken's Labyrinth. It was less a game, and more of a demo, showing that it wasn't just the geniuses at Id who could pull off fast 3D gaming technology.

Ken contacted us and we discussed working on a project together. I mentioned that I could put together a team to use his engine. But a few months went on and Ken then presented us with a demo of his Build engine, which was would be similar to the engine he knew that Id was creating for their coming game, Doom. He didn't really have a name for the engine, but his execution file was called, build.exe. And somehow this stuck as the name for his engine.



So, in August 1993 we had an employment agreement with Ken, and an exclusive license to use his Build engine on numerous projects.

John Carmack was interviewed and asked back in the 90's, who he thought were the best 3D coders other than himself. He said, "If I had to pick who I think is just the most talented, it would probably be Ken Silverman, the guy that did the Build engine. He does engines and tools. He writes all the code for everything, and he's just extremely talented."

3D Realms knew we had an amazing partnership with Ken, and we did all we could to maximize the use of the Build engine, creating Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior internally, co-funding and co-designing Blood, and licensing the engine to several other studios to make games. I think some 8-10 Build engine games came out all told.

The Build engine was truly the pinnacle of the 2.5D game engine period, which was kicked off with Id's Doom engine. Build went well beyond the features of Doom, with sloping features, partial looking up & down, rooms above rooms, and several other innovations.

Now, 20+ years later, we're super excited to be go back to our roots and use this incredible landmark of engine technology again. The Build engine, while not the most graphically gorgeous, is fast and allows for a gameplay style that hardly seen this century, with gun-blazing gameplay in wide-open multi-path levels that seem to go on forever. On today's tech, we can push the Build engine in ways that just weren't doable in the 90's, and so we're finding refreshing ways that this engine actually outperforms some modern engines, and bring back a style a gameplay that many gamers have long missed.

What's old becomes new again, and the early success of Ion Maiden seems to show we struck the right chord. It's like the 90's are back!

We're happy to announce that Ion Maiden will be playable on the showfloor at PAX EAST 2018 taking place in Boston, Massachusetts.

At the 3D Realms Booth (Booth #23120) you'll be able to play brand new content, get your hands on EXCLUSIVE Ion Maiden swag, and hang out with the 3D Realms crew!

We'll also host a special "Retro PC Gaming" panel, which includes 3D Realms VP / Executive Producer and Slipgate Managing Director, Frederik Schreiber, 3D Realms Founder and Industry Legend, Scott Miller, Pat the NES Punk, and others.


Let us know if you'll attend below!