Apogee co-founders Scott Miller and George Broussard have different ideas about what “killed the original 3D Realms” and the last Duke Nukem instalment, Duke Nukem Forever.

Apogee, which at one point also went by the name 3D Realms, has published several successful and super influential games but is best known for its biggest disaster: the 15-year development of Duke Nukem Forever, which Gearbox eventually completed. After leaked footage of the game’s 2001 build leaked this week, Apogee co-founders Scott Miller and George Broussard opened up, just a little, about what “killed the original 3D Realms” – and the former high school friends point fingers at each other.

Miller, who recently relaunched games publishing under the Apogee name, said today in a brief blog post that he hadn’t worked on the Duke Nukem Forever project, but as co-owner of the company, he had “good insight into the problems” that made it a “money-sucking” project. According to Miller, these problems included the studio being “understaffed by at least 50%”, not having a “good development schedule” and constantly rebooting the game to switch to new 3D technology, which “caused huge delays time and time again”.

It’s nothing new that engine changes have been a problem – this game launched in 1997 with the Quake 2 engine and wasn’t released until 2011 – and a Duke Nukem Forever-scale quagmire seems impossible without the other stuff being at least partly true. But how did they happen? Miller takes no responsibility.

Nor does he explicitly assign blame, but Broussard, who also owned Apogee and who was the director of Duke Nukem Forever until Gearbox took over, is an obvious target. Broussard had some things to say about Miller in response.

“It’s amazing the nonsense [Miller] talks,” Broussard wrote on Twitter. “Not surprising given the depth of his manipulation and narcissism. [At least] I had the class to keep my thoughts private.”

” I *have* a lot more to say about this, having known him since high school in the 70s. You just see how he takes advantage of the opportunity to try to make himself look better by throwing an ex-boyfriend (of 40+ years) and business partner under the bus. Def a guy you want to do business with!”