It was as dumb as you can imagine, and happened in a real strip club (minus the strippers). They picked us up in a stretch SUV, an affront to god. My interview with the sound designer was super awkward since it took place in the 'back rooms' where lap-dances happen, and she was trying VERY HARD to pretend we were anywhere else.
I commented in our dev server that at some point the official devs on DNF went from seeing Duke as an action hero to seeing Duke as Leisure Suit Larry, and I firmly believe that this is what nearly killed the franchise (and this is probably not a controversial opinion at all).
It's like the devs felt they had an excuse to imprint their internal culture on their product, and it's funny to me in an unsettled sort of way that there are a lot of people who are part of the "go woke, go broke" crowd who don't like how we're handling the Restoration Project because we're not doing the same things that nuked the franchise. They genuinely don't see that their "anti-wokeness" is a poison pill, and while our intent on the Project is to "restore" what could've been, there's no real way to go back to those times, nor should there be. We're not sorry that the Duke in our hearts and minds isn't a hateful bigot.
The Good Ol' Days sucked ass. I know. I lived them. And as gaming has become normalized, though the industry itself still sucks tremendous ass, capital-G Gamers are now the minority by far. They lost the battle on gatekeeping all of gaming. They haven't gotten over it. I don't think they ever will get over it, and they just get angrier and angrier that the wider world sees them for the hateful little weirdos they are when they assert that non-manly games aren't real games, or that women can't and shouldn't play Call of Duty.
It's easy to forget that these guys are in the minority. It's not a point we bring up a lot publicly, but we get a lot of shit for just having trans people working on the Restoration Project and more from that very vocal minority. Our project lead is a man of commendable willpower to weather the shit that's been slung our way. Good god, some of the criticism we've received has been astounding in the depths of its pettiness, like our choice to go with "woke" Gianni as Duke's voice actor instead of John Saint John.
But that's the shitty thing, is that while the bigots are in the minority, there's dense enough pockets of them to really make life unpleasant for anyone not like them in the communities they have larger ratios in, and it's kind of amazing to me that I found a dev team that isn't packed with bigots and pervs despite this being a Duke game. We do our darndest to make sure everyone on the team feels safe.
I dunno what I am really intending with this quote post. I was never a big fan of Duke. Honestly, I liked the old 2D platformer Duke better. I learned really quick that I wasn't allowed in capital-G Gamer culture, so maybe I just think it's funny that I ended up being the 2D lead on a project like this. I guess I just wanted to say that if @DNF2001RP was as greasy as the dev culture that spawned "Whizzle Tits", I wouldn't be here.
