Megadeth Month: Guitar Hero and Rust in Peace – 20 Years on

Heritage Day [24 Sep – SA]

September is Megadeth Month. I came up with this idea last year after I noticed several of Megadeth’s studio albums and compilations have come out in this month in past years. Lead singer Dave Mustaine’s birthday is also this month.

This week however marks two important events to occur this month. The one is the release of the game Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, said to be the ultimate release in the series of popular music games. The tracklist for the game looks to be awesome, with most of the legendary heavy metal, thrash metal, and hard rock acts you’d expect, appearing in the game with some of their best songs.

This includes one of the big four thrash metal bands ever – Megadeth – who will bring tracks like “This Day We Fight” off of their latest album from yesteryear, Endgame, as well as one of their most renowned tracks: “Holy Wars…The Punishment Due”.

This song is often listed in the top 3 thrash metal songs of all time, usually behind other greats like “Master of Puppets” by Metallica and “Raining Blood” by Slayer. And it appeared on no doubt one of their best albums, if not the best to date, Rust in Peace.

This week, on the 24th of September (today), marks the 20th anniversary of this “thrashterpiece”, which was originally released on this date in 1990 – during the last gasps of the thrash metal era which ruled the scene from the early 80’s until the early 90’s.

And perhaps by no coincidence, the aforementioned game, Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, will come out in the UK on the same date, followed by a US release a few days later.

Megadeth will also have the spotlight in this new offering, seeing as they are going to debut a completely new song, named “Sudden Death” which has been named a “finger buster” all ready by those who have listened to it or played it themselves by getting ripped versions of the song from previews on the web as well as charts. It’s set to be the last song on the tracklist.

Happy Megadeth Month!

Megadeth Month: Guitar Hero and Rust in Peace – 20 Years on

Scott Miller: ROTT and Shadow Warrior Sequels Possibly Planned

The other day, Duke4.net had an exclusive interview with Scott Miller, the CEO of 3D Realms. Something interesting in amongst the usual questions one would expect (met with rather abrupt answers for most of them), is this:

“Q10. Any plans for sequels for older titles such as Shadow Warrior and Rise of the Triads?
A: Absolutely.”

I guess now that Duke Nukem Forever, which one must admit was an amazingly huge time sink that’s lasted for thirteen years or so, has been handed over to Gearbox, along with the IP, 3D Realms actually has time for other projects now.

The last game that 3D Realms actually developed and released was Shadow Warrior… in 1997. That was the year after Duke Nukem 3D came out. The company has however been involved in a publishing capacity like with Max Payne since then, and overseen the release of several console-only Duke Nukem titles, but not much else.
So, while Randy Pitchford is polishing Duke Nukem’s rocket, and Gearbox is working on the last bit of Duke Nukem Forever, perhaps 3D Realms can get back to some of the other great games like Rise of the Triad and Shadow Warrior, from the 90’s.
And we want a proper game too – not some iPhone port of ROTT like was seen earlier this year.

3D Realms is a significantly smaller studio now though, since the DNF dev team was let go last year, so I don’t know how long it would take before development could actually begin, or whether the studio will actually do it themselves. They could probably just outsource it to another studio and publish the titles. Apogee Software was a big name in publishing years ago…
They won’t be able to really work on Duke Nukem titles any longer either seeing as the IP was sold to Gearbox. In the above mentioned interview, Scott Miller also replied to a question about whether the company would ever try to re-acquire the Duke Nukem IP. He said it’s “unlikely.” He also mentioned that he looks “forward to several decades worth of Duke console games released in a timely way”.

Timely = good. Console = meh.
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Source: Our Exclusive Duke Nukem Forever Interview with Scott Miller [Duke4.net]

Scott Miller: ROTT and Shadow Warrior Sequels Possibly Planned