Games that Stole My life #3 - Duke Nukem 3D

Duke Nukem 3D was one of the later Build Engine 3D First person shooters that emerged in the mid to late 90s as part of the FPS boom of that era. It wasn't the most technically advanced game, Quake had just launched with polygon graphics, it wasn't the most atmospheric, both Quake and the older Dark Forces beat it on that count, but it had a strange perfect storm combination of level design, humour and action that means it is still spoken about in hallowed tones to this day.

You play Duke Nukem, star of 2 side scrolling shot-em-ups, while travelling home from your latest adventure Duke is shot down after finding out that aliens have invaded, mutated the LAPD and in general caused chaos, and only one man can stop them.

In general gameplay involved you, as Duke, battling your way through levels, solving puzzles and finding keys. Nothing really that new. So, what was it in this game that chewed up so many hours of my adolescent life?

Some would list obvious answers such as its 18 rating, profanity and mild sexual references (It had strippers in) which were fun, as was much of the low brow humour, but it was more than that. The game had an immense sense of fun, often based in toilet humour but also in riffing as many films as possible. In fact 3D Realms were sued by ID Software over a small part of the game featuring a dead space marine from Doom, to which duke said "That's one Doomed space marine" There was stuff like this littered all over the place, but it went further. The level design incorporated in jokes, such as the Shawshank Redemption style escape tunnel behind a poster in the prison level. This was turned up a notch in the Plutonium Pack expansion, particularly in the Pigsty level, which riffed The Terminator, but also had Die Hard and Dirty harry references.

A second part of what appealed to me was the interaction and modeling. On a basic level, bullets left holes in concrete, mirrors and security cameras worked. A better touch was weapon effects, get shot by a shotgun close up, it hurt, and you knew it did, duke screamed, blood was liberally dashed on nearby walls. Similarly blow someone away next to a wall and there was a satisfying blood stain trickling down. It led to a decent but not too serious level of immersiveness.

Duke nukem introduced some interesting weapons. Yes it had the near traditional pistol, shotgun, chaingun, rocket launcher staples that we'd seen previously (Although adding clips to the pistol and making it a weapon with a fair rate of fire was nice) it then gave a fairly original (For the time) selection of extras, we had the shrink ray, which temporarily shrunk opponents down to micro size. This was used in some puzzles to shrink duke himself but there was always fun to be had shrinking and squashing enemies. Similarly the freeze gun allowed freezing and shattering. While Pipe bombs and laser trip bombs weren't used as much in combat they did provide extra spice to multiplayer (Where remote bombs and proximity mines tend to crop up as standard)

Finally level design. Duke nukem had two great aspects in the design of its levels. First was the look and feel of levels. Dukes second episode did some good things using old staples of space stations and moon bases, although these looked more like most other FPS games of the time, its real power was in grungy urban environments, which it did fantastically. Red light districts, Sushi restaurants, underground trains, lapdancing bars, fast food restaurants and a sorting office all crop up and these shine. There were even some pretty damn impressive looking stages, like the sunken city. Similarly the actual level design allowed for some spectacular setpieces, such as cutting down marauding baddies as they invade a bar, or ending one level in a trap, to start the next unarmed and in the electric chair, or on occasion where it just flung and onslaught of foes at you.

In the end, Duke Nukem was a fun adventure with some levels that just made you want to explore, while I liked Quake, ultimately, one had a dumb brightly coloured world where I could shoot aliens on the toilet and have showdowns with flying pigs in an LA backstreet, the other had moody Gothic atmosphere. In the end, you always go back to the flying pigs.