Beyond Good and Evil 2 Breaks Duke Nukem Forever's Infamous Record
Beyond Good & Evil 2 has overtaken Duke Nukem Forever in the category of longest high-budget game in development. To make matters worse, we are still years away from BG&E2's release.
As noted by an editor of GamesIndustry.biz, Beyond Good & Evil 2 may claim an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records in the category of the longest game development cycle.
- The current owner of this title is Duke Nukem Forever, which was in development for 5156 days.
- Beyond Good & Evil 2 has long since overtaken DNF, as 5242 days have passed since the showing of the game's first trailer.
- In fact, the work on BG&E2 has taken even longer, as the brand's father, Michel Ancel, was said to have been working on the sequel for at least a year before the first trailer was shown.
Of course, these dozen years are not a period of continuous work without any breaks. Both in the case of Duke Nukem Forever, as well as Beyond Good & Evil 2, the work was repeatedly interrupted, and after some time resumed. Both titles also experienced several reboots.
As you may recall, recently Ubisoft assured, that BG&E2 is still in development. However, sources connected with the developers suggest that we are at least two years away from the release. One can only hope that when the project finally debuts on the market, it will not turn out to be as big a disappointment as Duke Nukem Forever (which was fixed by fans only eleven years after release).
Solo developers can work on games even longer
We don't know exactly what criteria the Guinness Book of World Records body used, but we suspect that only professional games created by large teams were eligible. If we were to take into account lone independent developers, nothing compares with Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar. Cleve Blakenmore spent twenty years developing this RPG. Importantly, he is no amateur - he previously worked at Sir-Tech on the Wizardry series.
