Beyond Good and Evil 2 Breaks Duke Nukem Forever’s Sad Record for Longest Development Game

There are records that it is better not to beat. And unfortunately for Ubisoft, Beyond Good and Evil 2 (BGE2 for friends) became the video game with the longest development, thus beating the duration record long held by Duke Nukem Forever, a game announced in 1997 by Apogee Software and released in 2011 under the leadership of Gearbox Software (after a detour to 3D Realms). BGE2 was unveiled on its side in 2008… and still does not seem ready to be released 14 years after its initial announcement!

The development of BGE 2, a direct sequel to the fabulous Beyond Good and Evil of the PS2/Xbox and GameCube generation, then began to get bogged down. These big development concerns were put on the back of Michel Ancela demanding (and often whimsical) creator whose management methods were strongly criticized at the time.

Duke Nukem

In a context of quasi-purge after serious revelations of sexual harassment by Ubisoft executives (crimes of which Ancel was not accused in passing), Michel Ancel then preferred to drop everything in 2020, a withdrawal… which did not did not really improve the progress of the project. From there to say that the creator of BGE was not the only one responsible for the ambient chaos, there is only one step that we can easily take…

Beyond Good and Evil 2 therefore now belongs to the category of cursed games, to the point that a total cessation of the project frankly seems more likely than the announcement of a release date. Shame…