But all of that's a walk in the park compared the absolute clincher. "The downside is that no matter how great a game you have, if the license tanks or gets cancelled, your game is unsellable."
It's bad enough when being hitched to a turkey like Brothers Grunt sends two months work to the bottom of the ocean. Way worse is when a big company (say, Playmates Toys) decides to shoot a bunch of executives (say, the heads of Playmates Interactive) and drown all their babies. They whittled down a list of 28 games to one. Duckman wasn't the one. Coliz tells the sad story:
"There are really two issues with Duckman. One is the license, the other is the project. Playmates had some shakeups. The vice-president, an old friend of ours called David Loomin, was moved out and all of his projects got the frown. The new fellow did risk-analysis and said, 'This is unacceptable to me.' Now, the fact that the show got cancelled in that period of time certainly impacted his decision. If the show had been this big hit, he'd have said, 'I don't care what the risk is, we've got to get this game out.' As it was, it was just a game, so it lost the benefit of being licensed."
Illusions fought long and hard to keep Duckman alive, slimming down to an absolutely essential crew of five and, rather than buying a yacht, rented temporary lodgings on a houseboat in Sausalito. The game was finished. They got paid. Even so, the game never made it onto the release schedule.
Not everything was lost. Illusions had been smart enough to spend a good part of their development money on building a solid infrastructure.
"What we were left with was a million dollar engine. We wanted to make an adventure-game system that we could reuse. In Duckman, the engine was 75% of the process. When we were finished with Duckman, the game belonged to the publisher. All that we gave them was the 25%, but we got to keep the engine. Because it was so abstract, we were able to reuse it and improve upon it. By adding a networking component, we were able to use this engine for the Necessary Evil; and then later on with Beavis and Butthead. Even the Minigolf game uses this engine with a plug-in that handles the specifics and the 3D nature of the green."
By a strange twist of fate, Duckman is still a hit show in Germany, of all places. Maybe if Duckman hadn't had such a German sense of humor, it would still be with us today, but let that rest. Finished as it was, the game was picked up by a German firm that took all the voicework from the famous people and dubbed it into German.
So much for household names. Oh, but wait, here's one last horror story.
Next: Beavis and Butt-head hit a roadblock 
