Preying for 3DRealms: Why you shouldn't care

Logan Booker explains why Prey is back from the dead.

All is going well for 3DRealms as of late.

The once dead Prey has found a second wind with Human Head Studios and id's Doom 3 engine. It's been around six years since we last heard anything about this revolutionary title, and although it may very well see the light of day now that it's with a proven developer, I can't say I'm excited about it.

Depressed would be a better way to describe my feelings. In fact, I buried my face in my hands when I heard the news. Some creatures of myth are best left in the land of hopes and dreams where the icing is always fresh and development cycles are as long as you want them to be.

Prey's tragic past is one few can recall with any degree of accuracy, mainly because 3DRealms kept a tight lid on anything of interest during its abortive creation. This has worked against 3DRealms for many, many years now. Truly, the only benefit the company has gained from the total media blackout is that it can do whatever the heck it wants on Duke Nukem Forever, including not doing anything at all.

To be perfectly honest, it hasn't been a total media blackout. We have had the odd blatant attempt to divert attention away from 3DRealms almost cemented reputation for succumbing to debilitating feature creep.

Take this for example. Or this.

It's stuff like this, stuff with no discernible relevance to anything, that makes me want to suck my brains out of my head with a vacuum cleaner or shove my face into a chemical toilet and flush until my eyes have melted.

With no shareholders to answer to, 3DRealms has free reign on the hearts of its beloved community. A community that is desperately trying to gorge itself on the crumbs it has been thrown. In reality, it is a malnutritioned bunch that has been left wanting time and time again.

So then, why is Prey a false prophet? Because 3DRealms is desperately trying to push DNF into the background. Even a whisper of Prey would have been enough to do that -- the actual development of the game means that 3DRealms wants this distraction to last at least a year.

Prey started out as 3DRealms' attempt to enter the next generation engine race. Sparkling beginnings were formed at the fingertips of a young Ken Silverman, with a project called PolyTex. Fortunately for Ken, PolyTex never evolved into a full-blown engine, but it did start a chain reaction that would be the genesis of Prey.

Enter Tom Hall, 3DRealms resident design brainiac. It was with Hall that Prey began its decent into infamy.

The killer feature of Prey was its 'Portal' technology. In essence, it allowed you to see part of a level map from another, different level map. Great for the day, but it's been done now in Serious Sam.

Today, the technology is old hat.

The other aspect of Prey that had everyone talking was that it was designed to be a scalable engine with development tools the likes of which no designer had seen before. Prey, in reality, was all about 'Preditor' -- the mystical digitalised assistant that made Prey so delectable to the gaming press. With this tool, 3DRealms exclaimed, one could create levels, characters and features for their Prey-powered games with ease. It was to be powerful and omnipotent. It was to be the beginning and the end.

And it was. Much of Prey's feature creep can be attributed to this glorified level editor. It saw many revisions and improvements over the course of the game's development to bring it in line with Tom Hall's vision. Or maybe it wasn't Hall's vision -- it could easily have been George Broussard or Scott Miller, but I guess we'll never know.

I'm pretty sure Paul Schuytema (the game's third project lead) tried to make Prey all that it could be, but by the time he was given control (around 1997), the project was already showing signs of malaise.

Now, Human Head is using Doom 3, so there's no chance of an engine revolution and there's little reason for the company to create new tools when the ones supplied by id are more than good enough. It'd just add more development time to a project that's already been in the making for almost ten years.

What does this all have to do with DNF? It was around the same time that Prey was being made that 3DRealms embarked on the now crazy fiasco of DNF. 3DRealms was handling two projects at once, a practice it has learnt from.

You may have noticed more news has been released on DNF in the past six months than in the entire five or so years since its last appearance at E3. Too much news actually.

The most important has been the announcement of a new physics engine. The response this garnered from online sites was amazing. Like I said, the community is eager to feed on whatever it can get. The news did raise an interesting question: Is 3DRealms still using the Unreal Engine? A discussion best left for another time, but it made me curious nonetheless.

The point is that people are once again revved about DNF. It's the talk of the town. 3DRealms is being watched closely, and it's the sort of attention it probably doesn't want right now.

Hence, Prey was reborn.

It's been in the pipeline for at least two years now. All you had to do was check the hiring page at Human Head Studios. It was after a level guy with Doom 3 experience. There was talk of a joint HHS and 3DRealms game. Things started to add up.

Now, we have a job position open at 3DRealms for a level designer. Again, news that was leapt on from great heights by sites like Gamespot and IGN. I have to say however, the job posting left me utterly disgusted.

What really made me angry were these two statements:

(In fact, we've rarely lost a developer that hasn't left to go start their own business, such as Ion Storm and Ritual. This is a testament to the quality of talent we've attracted over the years.)

Except Ion Storm was a total and complete failure. It doesn't exist anymore guys.

And:

In business since 1991. Never had a loan. Never had layoffs. Multiple million selling titles leading to an extremely stable, and successful environment.

3DRealms has lost developers -- some good developers -- because of Prey. These include Tom Hall, Corrine Yu, Paul Schuytema, Jim Dose, William Scarboro, Chuck Jones… the list goes on. While it is true that some did start their own companies or found greener pastures, many did not. Most quit, so it depends on what you see as being better -- laying someone off or having them quit.

The lesser of two evils for 3DRealms maybe? Like a bad memory, 3DRealms has all but blocked out the mangled, mismanaged ordeal that was Prey.

To say it hasn't had layoffs kind of sidesteps the once very real issue with 3DRealms' company culture. Obviously something was up to have such a purging of talent. Who knows what it is like now, but Broussard and Miller still head the company, so anything is possible.

I honestly hope Human Head does a great job of Prey, now that its development is inevitable. However, it makes no sense for 3DRealms to bring it back into the fore, considering the trouble attached to the name. The only reason I can see is to draw heat away from DNF for another year or two while the developers continue to work on ways to top Half-Life 2. Unless, of course, they see STALKER or FEAR when they're released, and feature creep once again strikes.

-- Logan Booker

If you'd like to read more about Prey, 3DRealms, and the turbulent history of the FPS genre, check out the eight-page feature in issue 46 of Atomic Magazine.