Half-Life: Counter Strike, and the first person shooter genre was something almost every gamer could relate to. For its own segment of time, it had dominated the internet café gaming scene as well as every major lan party and the WCG tournaments from 2002 to today. Now, Gearbox Software, the minds behind CS are now working on the previously defunct IP Duke Nukem. With them behind the scenes, we’re sure to see an award winner for that upcoming title Duke Nukem Forever.
Founded in 1999, Gearbox’s debut was greeted with strong releases to expansions of Valve’s Half-Life platform such as Counter Strike, Opposing Force, Blue Shift, and Counter Strike:Souce for the Playstation 2 platform, as well as Half-Life: Decay for the Sega Dreamcast. This apparently was their greatest market push. The fact that the Half-Life engine was ported over to the gaming consoles by them.
In 2005, Gearbox had launched their first original IP Brothers in Arms which was published by Ubisoft. And then had subsequently released Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 on the Xbox, PC, and Playstation 2. Later that year a sequel, Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood, and yet both games had earned numerous awards and topped sales charts. In 2006, the development of Brothers in Arms Hell’s Highway was announced (later released in 2008). The title did earn very strong positive reviews as compared to other world war 2 franchises such as Call of Duty, Wolfenstein, and the popular Medal of Honor.
After the completion of Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood, Gearbox began working on their second original game franchise, Borderlands. Released 2009-10-20, Borderlands is billed as a “role playing shooter” (a first-person shooter with RPG elements).
In late 2008, Gearbox Software started implementing the internal alpha focus testing on their current projects. Here, they had started allowing gamers in the Dallas area, to have the opportunity to visit their office in Plano, and play unreleased games and give feedback regarding fun factor, gameplay, progression and other such important factors when building on a game concept’s polish.
Recently, the company had revealed at Penny Arcade this unmistakable and telling sign that proves that Duke Nukem Forever is indeed going to hit shelves soon and that the defunct IP now has a new home with Gearbox, which has such a rich history of taking existing IP’s and making them better.
