I hope you held onto your pre-order receipt. It turns out that the $5 you laid down on ‘Duke Nukem Forever’ may be worth something after all.

This just might be the classiest move of all time from a game company that’s rapidly becoming my favorite. Gearbox Software, the folks that are finally finishing the long-unreleased ‘Duke Nukem Forever’, are going one step further to make sure that fans get everything they’ve been hoping for.

“There are a lot of people who pre-ordered the game,” explains Gearbox president and CEO Randy Pitchford. “I don’t know what we can do yet, but something should be done for the people who pre-ordered.”

The problem with finding the right solution is that neither Gearbox nor the original developer took any of the money from pre-orders. That’s not something developers do, and it’s not something that publishers do – it’s something that the retail chains decided to do on their own.

Some of those chains still exist, but are unlikely to honor a 10-year-old receipt. Others have gone out of business or been purchased by other chains, taking that pre-order money with them.

“We’ve been starting to talk with retailers,” says Pitchford. “We’ve started to engage them, saying ‘Hey, you’ve got customers who you made a promise to, and any bad feeling they have will reflect on us, so can we work together to do something for those people?”

There’s no word on what exactly is going to be done for those who pre-ordered, but with release of the game slated for early 2011, expect to hear something soon.