

Schreiber initially had difficulty reaching anyone at Take-Two Interactive who would listen to his proposal, so he again contacted Gearbox Software, hoping they would have a better relationship with Take-Two Interactive than 3D Realms. When he spoke with 3D Realms, the proof-of-concept screenshots were enough to convince Scott Miller of the project's merits, but Miller informed Schreiber that the game would also require approval from the publishers at Take-Two Interactive. In an attempt to obtain official permission to develop a Duke Nukem 3D remake, Schreiber first contacted Gearbox Software, who told him to contact George Broussard and Scott Miller at 3D Realms. At the time, Schreiber was an up-and-coming entrepreneur who had just won a startup competition in Denmark for an accessories company he founded in 2007, but he also had an academic background in Integrated Digital Media and possessed exactly the skillset needed to develop video games. In response to overwhelmingly positive feedback on his screenshots, Schreiber proposed assembling a team to recreate all of Duke Nukem 3D in Unreal Engine 3. The screenshots were quickly circulated on other gaming websites and briefly went viral. In Fall 2010, Frederik Schreiber posted to the Gearbox Software forums screenshots from Duke Nukem 3D levels that he had, in his spare time, recreated in Unreal Engine 3. Although a previous prototype was leaked in 2012 and successfully scrubbed from the Internet, the x0r_jmp prototype is still widely available to download and may remain so, given subsequent legal developments. On December 31, 2022, x0r_jmp publicly released a build that was last updated in September 2011, likely corresponding to the final working version of the game before it was put on hold. Production entered an indefinite hiatus in September 2011. The video game studio Interceptor Entertainment (later renamed Slipgate Ironworks) was launched initially as a volunteer effort specifically to work on the game. The project was headed by Frederik Schreiber, who would later become the CEO of 3D Realms.

The project was first announced on the Gearbox Software forums on Octoand was intended to be a next-generation reimagining of the 1996 game, Duke Nukem 3D. Singleplayer, Multiplayer Duke Nukem 3D: Reloaded, formerly known as Duke Nukem Next-Gen, was a first-person shooter fan project that was officially sanctioned for non-commercial development.
