Once in a week I check the 3DR forums to see if there is any news about DNF. I noticed the BBC news about prey a few weeks ago:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=5249
About Prey:
History
Tom Hall Era (1995-1996)
The year was 1995, the place was Apogee / 3D Realms headquarters in Garland, TX. The Developers of Incredible Power (DIP) just completed their first major game, Rise of the Triad, but that's another story. With id Software's Quake just around the corner, 3D Realms needed a next generation 3D game to compete. With the other team in the company working on Duke Nukem 3D, it was the DIP's turn to start on a new project, led by Tom Hall.
The original story for Prey, as told by Tom Hall:
You are abducted from Earth, and wake up with a biotech suit on. Not only on you, but parts of it are woven into you, tubes and wires enter muscles, joints, and so on. You'll never be the same again. Alien races are studying six different disciplines of fighting, and you are grist for their mill, meant to be killed as they practice and perfect their study of their chosen discipline. Your job is to survive, which means you must learn how the world works, how to use the alien weapons, and what tactics will work against the strong attackers you're pitted against.
In April, 1996, the world was given its first real look at the game when, the now defunct, Titania Magazine conducted the first preview of the game and the first interview of the Prey team. The preview also included a number of concept sketches.
http://atlas.secs.oakland.edu/~lcmatero/prey/previews/Titania/Prey.html
All seemed to be going well for 3D Realms and the Prey team, well, until a little thing called Black Monday. On Monday, August 12, 1996 most of the Prey team quit and walked out of the company. Pretty much all that was left of the Prey team was the engine programmer, William Scarboro. It should also be noted that Levelord left the Duke3D team to join Ritual the same day.
Paul Schuytema Era (1997-1998)
Perhaps the golden age of Prey; the team grew in size and the pace sped up. Also, a new character and epic storyline are introduced. 3D Realms put out a press release on the new Prey leader.
At E3 1997, Prey showed its stuff. A non-interactive demo was shown, and everyone got a peek at a weapon or two and a few characters in the game.
http://atlas.secs.oakland.edu/~lcmatero/prey/files/Prey_E3_1997_Demo1.mov
http://atlas.secs.oakland.edu/~lcmatero/prey/files/Prey_E3_1997_Demo2.mov
That's just the beginning, Paul Schuytema gave demos to press and this is where we can come as close to actually playing the game: Infinite MHZ Interview.
http://atlas.secs.oakland.edu/~lcmatero/prey/files/Prey_E3_1997_IMHz.avi
A little more professional non-interactive demo loop was shown at this E3 1998:
http://atlas.secs.oakland.edu/~lcmatero/prey/files/Prey_E3_1998_Demo.mpg
Also, the TV show, Infinite Mhz, conducted a video interview in the back room. This is the best look at Prey that we have.
http://atlas.secs.oakland.edu/~lcmatero/prey/files/Prey_E3_1998_IMHz.avi
By 1998, the Prey Team grew to its maximum, but they did not go on to deliver a shareware 1.0 version or a gold CD of Prey. Something happened. On October 13, 1998, George Broussard announced that Paul Schuytema and William Scarboro were no longer on the Prey team.
Corrinne Yu Era (1999)
For the second time, Prey was without a creative leader for the game. The game design portion of the project came to a standstill. Meanwhile, Corrinne Yu, the Director of Advanced Technology at ION Storm, was hired by 3D Realms in November of 1998. 3D Realms decided to give one last try at developing a next generation in-house engine, and Corrinne was the one to do it. The press release stated "Prey and Duke Nukem 5 (tentative title) will be the first games to use this technology."
Throughout 1999, Corrinne worked on a top secret engine. With her impressive background, it seemed like nothing could go wrong. Scott Miller mentioned that her work was impressive, but no specifics of this project are known. During this time, the DNF project was ramping up. It was assumed everything was going fine with the next Prey engine too, but that was not the case. An editorial at Avault speculated a bit.
http://www.avault.com/editorials/index.asp?editorial=edit84
In early 2000, Corrinne was gone (fired?) with no explanations. I suppose 3D Realms finally gave up on creating their own engine. Corrinne did make a lot of posts on Slashdot around this time and posted on Yahoo's message boards once in a while. It appears Corrinne Yu has started a new game company called Elapse Software (which later disappeared too).
Human Head Studios Era (2000-2005)
Rumor
In 2002 we heard from Prey again with a rumor from Evil Avatar:
Human Head's Prey Revealed 3/11/2002 2:30:44 PM by Certis
From the Rumor department comes the interesting news that 3D Realms' long dead project, Prey, is back from the grave - this time using the new id Software DOOM game engine, developed over at Human Head Studios and published under the Take 2 label.
3D Realms has since neither confirmed nor denied this rumor.
Jobs
In 2002, Human Head posted job openings for a level designer skilled in "QERadiant and the Quake 3 engine for an upcoming title". Again, in 2004-05, the job opening page describes an opening for a "next-generation project using the Doom 3 engine". A game with the Doom 3 engine corresponds to the original rumor.
Trademarks
Titles of games and names of characters are usually trademarked so no other games can use them. The nice thing about trademarks is, anyone can search for them online. It appears there is at least some interest in the Prey and Talon trademarks from 3D Realms. Some trademarks have been abandoned, such as "Preditor", "Be Brave", and "Talon Brave". However, a mystery name "Tommy Hawk" is live. "Talon" was most recently filed for a trademark on August 7, 2001, and is still listed as live. "Prey" is listed as live and has last been filed on July 2, 2003.
Domains
3D Realms registered BuyPrey.com on July 23, 2001. It expires in 2008.
3D Realms purchased Prey.com in 2004. It was previously listed for sale at $850,000:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040210120605/http:/www.prey.com/
Some days ago on the 15th of april, 3DR opened their prey page:
http://www.prey.com
You see they made kind of a fake page, but wait for a few secs
Very mysterious isn't it?
"Earth´s savior doesn´t want the job"- Duke Nukem??
But there is more:
You see 3 borders at the bottom right, They are all secret messages:
"Need a clue? Get a good source."
Check out the source of the site... You get this in the meta description:
<meta name="description" content="0100100001101001011001000110100101101110
0110011100100000011101000110100001101001011011
1001100111011100110010000001101001011011100010
0000011101000110100001100101001000000111001101
1011110111010101110010011000110110010100100000
0110001101101111011001000110010100100000011010
0101110011001000000111001101101111001000000011
0010001100000111010001101000001000000110001101
1001010110111001110100011101010111001001111001
0010111000100000010010010110011000100000011110
0101101111011101010010011101110010011001010010
0000011011000110111101101111011010110110100101
1011100110011100100000011001100110111101110010
0010000001101101011011110111001001100101001000
0001101001011011100110011001101111001110100010
0000010100000100001100100000010001110110000101
1011010110010101110010001011100010000001001010
0111010101101110011001010010000001101001011100
1101110011011101010110010100101110001000000101
0111011011110111001001101100011001000111011101
1010010110010001100101001000000110010001100101
01100010011101010111010000101110" />
Go and translate the Binary code yourself:
http://www.roubaixinteractive.com/PlayGround/Binary_Conversion/Binary_To_Text.asp
"Joanie Loves Tchotchkes"
Apparently, that phrase is from a smartmoney article.
Tchotchkes is the stuff that companies send customers to say, "Hey, we're thinking of you, [fill in name]...Happy Holidays" — the subtext of which is "We sent you and thousands of other people a [fill in item] so that you'll keep buying our widgets."
Thanks to the members of the 3DR forum who discovered it all, the first one is still a question...
I got many of the importent history facts about Prey from this site:
http://atlas.secs.oakland.edu/~lcmatero/prey/index.htm
See yourself it's a great site with a lot of old goodies, screens, logos, videos etc of Prey.
I'm suspecting alot of this game.
Greetz,
3DShootMaster
