MechWarrior 5: Clans couldn’t have happened without Duke Nukem Forever

With the forthcoming release of MechWarrior 5: Clans, we are approaching four full decades of the mecha action series. It’s been a wild ride that’s taken the series in multiple directions, from single-player titles to a full online game. But getting to this point — and even getting developer Piranha Games the rights to work on the series — has been a long, strange trip. It’s a story that involves a spider web of IP ownership, a last minute lawsuit, and even the infamous Duke Nukem Forever.

Robot history

Russ Bullock is the founder and CEO of Piranha Games. He’s followed BattleTech, the tabletop wargame that spawned MechWarrior, since the beginning. First, it was playing on pen paper in his cousin’s basement. That was his experience until the BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception video game arrived in 1988. The first MechWarrior game came after in 1989, but it was MechWarrior 2 that set the gaming world on fire.

“That was the biggest game in the world at the time,” Bullock tells Digital Trends during a visit to Piranha Games’ studio. “It doubled the size of Activision. It seemed like it was coming out of every box of cereal, on every platform, with every 3D accelerator.”

Enough work for hire. We need to establish something of our own.

The MechWarrior series continued with expansions, sequels, spinoffs. Then suddenly, following the 2001 Black Knight expansion for MechWarrior 4, it disappeared. At the time, Piranha was working as a hired gun, contracted out to do coproduction on games like Need for Speed or Transformers, but it was eager to take the next step.

“No matter how good of work you do, how much you do incredible feats like porting ancient engines, you really aren’t going to get anywhere without creating your own product,” Bullock says.

License to mech

Bullock checked in on the availability of the dormant MechWarrior license several times with no luck. It didn’t help that the IP was split, with the video game, board game, and mini figs rights all going to