Frontline Studios were in the midst of making three Duke Nukem games for the PSP and DS. Those games would have made up the Duke Nukem Trilogy and the first one was going to be entitled Critical Mass. They were going to be third-person action games published by Apogee.
Frontline Studio’s Duke games were a shining bastion of Nukem hope in the otherwise bleak landscape of gaming that contained no hope of Duke Nuke Forever releasing. Now, that bastion has been destroyed by the very thing it served to replace.
The reason is obvious: Gearbox now owns Duke and everything Duke-like. This means Frontline Studios and Apogee have no claim to the Duke IP and as such they are changing, rather than abandoning, their games.
Duke Nukem: Critical Mass is now called Extraction Point: Alien Shootout. As for Duke himself, he’s being replaced by Cam Nash. No idea who Cam is or whether he’ll be able to hold his own against the Mighty Foot of the Duke IP, but we’ll have to wait and see until Extraction Point is released on PSP later this year as a PSN download. Additionally, the DS version is switching to a 3DSiWare release for later in 2011.
This also creates a very rare opportunity for a case study: how much does a game rely on a recognisable IP? The gameplay and content for Extraction Point is not being altered save for the removal of a recognisable character. Will that be enough to affect sales of the game?
Source: Kotaku
Last Updated: November 1, 2010
