It’s so hard to say who first reported the news that 3D Realms was only going to get $4,250 for the publishing of Duke Nukem Forever due to a renegotiation of their contract with Take-Two. But that mistake is everywhere now.

The new deal was referenced as being reported in Take-Two’s most recent SEC filing. SEC filings always report figures in thousands of dollars. So Take-Two actually brought the payout down from $6 million to $4.25 million, stupids. It takes very little time to get the SEC filing off of Yahoo, and then CTRL-F to search for “Duke”. Less than a minute. Then you would have had a chance to see you were being dumb.

What you couldn’t have known from reading that, though, is that a) this is two month-old news, or five months if you were good at connecting old dots, and b) the payment isn’t going to 3D Realms, but rather has already gone to DNF’s original publisher, GT Interactive, now part of Atari. If you’ll recall GT also had gotten $6 million when they signed over the publishing rights to Take-Two in the first place, too, aka the smartest deal GT Interactive ever made. The truth is, 3D Realms is going to get nothing from Take-Two for shipping except a a royalty check or two before the game is laughed off of shelves.

You guys did nail the part about the $500,000 bonus if it ships before the end of the year, though! Except it also goes to Atari. Great blogging!

Quite a list of blogtardedness involved here:

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• Nintendo DS Lite on sale starting at midnight.
• Wipe all patches and cached game data from a 360 hard drive. Only commonly agreed use so far is for rolling back the iffy Oblivion patch.
• Hell Tycoon. Satan, satan, lend me a dollar.
• FTC investigation into San Andreas “Hot Coffee” mod ends with nothing but a warning for Rockstar.

In honor of the second and final day of the Sex in Videogames Conference— the premier event for women to gather and discuss the latest ways to not feel lonely while they masturbate, and maybe some other stuff— the Metafuture Women’s Studies Division would like to present an essay on other stuff— why Alyx of Half-Life 2 is not an engaging character to her peer group women.

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What unpleasant upcoming game concerns a word that’s both a verb and a noun, characters named via pun, and a random storyline attached to gameplay that appears to add nothing interesting to a derivative formula?

No, it’s not the poop game from Codemasters. Good guess, though. Donkey Pong and the Adventures of Rimdiana Jones certainly has enough benighted punnery, and poop— along with several of its synonyms— is 100% gerundial.

But regardless of the striking similarities between the two creating an alternate answer, the real answer is (highlight to see)

» Prey, starring bar abductee/immortal Native American Tommy Hawk. «

Congratulations if you guessed the right answer!

How does the company that outright owns Grand Theft Auto (and published recent hits Civilization IV and Oblivion) lose over half its market value in the space of a year? Take-Two was valued at a 52-week high price of $29.60 per share— 51 weeks ago. With trading down $2.50 a share today, the current price is in the mid 14’s. Historically, that’s a net gain of about zero since Grand Theft Auto III became a hit almost five years ago.

Who’s getting paid the millions of CEO dollars to piss away all that revenue?

That’s the news. The news wasn’t that it was Snow, because nobody cared about Snow— in fact, that’s probably the first time you ever heard about it. Even the completist GameSpot couldn’t care less: it has just two pieces of information about it: its showing at E3 2005 and the cancellation— and the former was so buzz-unworthy they used Bethany Massimilla to cover it.

Why the lack of interest? Because it was a cel-shaded tycoon game about running drugs with card-based battle sequences. Sure, that may sound interesting— until I tell you that this was not the idea of a lovably crazy Japanese man, but rather a company whose previous release was an expansion pack for Tropico 2. It’s quite probable that a random number generator figured heavily into the design phase, and in fact Snow was the one picked over the other finalist, a first-person survival horror game about running drugs, with battles resolved via horse racing.

Of course a plausible reason for the game’s cancellation, therefore, was obviously…that Rockstar felt the game was going to be too controversial. So instead of making it run-of-the-mill controversial— like their recently shipped PS2 port of the decapitated-with-spurting-neck simulator Liberty City Stories— and raking in cash, they decided to scrap what was surely a profitable game to avoid their public image taking a beating beyond their current comfort level of “embodiment of the culturally mephitic evil of the game industry.”

Here’s a more plausible conjecture derived from the events: Rockstar cancels Snow. Snow cancels school. Therefore, Rockstar wants there to be more school, and Bully is currently being re-worked as an edutainment title to be provided free as a public service. Post that, Kotaku, Joystiq, Destructoid, etc.

Final Score:

Mocap session – No
Wiggling wireframed scenery/models around in the editor – Yes
Voice recording session – Sorta (Music recording)

Prior – Documentaries On Making Games: We Care

Get – Halo 3 : Behind the Scenes [Bungie.net]

After a miscued announcement last week, Perfect Dark Zero now really does have four new multiplayer maps available for download on Ye Olde 360 Marketplace. Though it would seem that the entire point of the Microsoft Points micropayment system would be that each level could be purchased separately for 125 points, “GasPlant,” “Plaza,” “Rooftops,” and “Trench” are available only as a pack for 500 Microsoft Points (aka $6.25). Enjoy, suckers.