Duke Nukem 3D
Ultra Cool Game #4
Type of Game
An ode to boobery in all its forms, as well as unrestrained violence. A summary of the worst (and also the coolest) of the 1990s.
Release date on our Machines
April 1996, or February, or September, I can't remember which version I had among the ten thousand that exist.
Developer
3D Realms Entertainment, Inc. It didn't take them FOREVER to release it. Hehehehehehe
Publisher
3D Realms Entertainment, Inc., which keeps getting bought, sold, rebooted, and resold. Pretty resilient, though.
Duke Nukem 3D : available on Steam ( 20th Anniversary World Tour), and Zoom (Atomic Edition). Not nearly enough for a game of this caliber!
​One fine morning, when I arrived at school, my best friend Randall Geyser greeted me in a strange way. He had adopted a voice that was both smooth and gravelly to spout nonsense in English, a stupid smile plastered across his face. Why had he changed so much, so quickly? He told me I would understand if I came over to his house to play his new favorite game. A few days later, after spending Saturday in front of his PC, I was acting just as silly as he was. I had been brainwashed by a game of Duke Nukem 3D. I immediately copied his disc with the fantastic Nero Burning ROM software so I could play it at home too, because even though it was an FPS, a genre I wasn't particularly fond of, it was impossible to ignore a pop culture monument like this one. “Come Get Sooooome!”
Voice that breaks
Arms that Pump
In my opinion, Duke Nukem 3D remains the worthy successor to Doom 2. I mean, before, we talked about Doom 2, and after, we only talked about Duke Nukem. At least, that's how it was among my group of semi-antisocial preteen gamers. From our character's internal perspective (we only see his hands, but we can feel all his testosterone), we kill aliens, not demons. Other than that, the principle remains the same as in Doom: we 're equipped with a substantial arsenal, various bonuses and equipment, and that's it. You then destroy everything that moves in levels that are more or less well designed, and especially well designed in this particular game. Pure, almost non-stop action, showering the player with explosions, bits of alien flesh, and unspeakable mayhem. If you have rowdy kids, put them in front of this game. An hour later, they'll be exhausted and leave you alone until the next day.
On the other hand, there is a significant chance that this will turn them into despicable machos for the rest of their lives; it's up to you to weigh the pros and cons. Randall and I took the risk, but without telling our parents, of course. My mom would never have allowed me to wallow in that at eleven years old. But since her blind spot was always at the level of the PC screen no matter where she looked, I had plenty of freedom to try anything and everything. Did we switch to the dark side of unbridled masculinity? Well, for a while, yes! Completely. But we were mostly just doing what everyone else around us was doing, following the norm in the 90s. And not everyone around us was playing Duke Nukem 3D. The responsibility doesn't lie with him. Not only him. Still, we wanted to buy big shoes so we could kick everyone in the butt, that's for sure.
pecs that burst
While that suited us perfectly at the time, the gameplay isn't exactly groundbreaking. Sure, we get to have fun with a whole bunch of weapons with different capabilities, such as the rocket launcher, the double rocket launcher, the freezethrower stolen from Mr. Freeze, or the shrinker stolen from Rick Moranis, but it's still the same old bullying we've been doing since Wolfenstein. Yes, we were happy with it, no, we didn't ask for more. And yet, we got much more than that. From the very first seconds, and throughout our journey, Duke Nukem deploys his real asset, namely his OUT-STAND-ING humor! Guys comfortable in your pants, you're going to laugh your socks off. Girls, a little less, sorry. The punchlines that the character throws out throughout his journey greatly contribute to the immersion. That said, this very particular sense of irony has aged very badly. And yet, as a great lover of the nineties, I am probably being far too lenient in my judgment.
If today, the jokes that punctuate the experience still make you laugh like a maniac, then you probably need to take a little course in deconstruction. Oh! Oh! Oh! The great jokes about bottoms and prostitutes! Hey! Hey! You can pee in toilets, and our avatar groans with relief right after shooting an alien sitting on those very same toilets. And right after shooting strippers, too. PFOUAHAHAH ROFLMAOOOOO ! But yeah, it did make us roll on the floor laughing our asses off. Was there anything more amusing and subtle at the dawn of the 21st century? Not sure at all. Just watch any episode of Let's Make a Deal to compare, or the humor in Men in Black, or Independence Day (sorry Will Smith, nothing personal), or Uncle Mitch's jokes about women during barbecues; well, Duke Nukem doesn't seem so basic anymore, all of a sudden. We've just forgotten how much we were being served the same kind of stuff everywhere, all the time, no matter where we looked.
No need to dig into the cringiest depths of audiovisual media. The “funny guy” combo who sees a “pretty woman” always resulted in the same thing, and we knew we were going to have a good laugh, HAHAHA! At least nothing in Duke Nukem is taken seriously, even if, um, the very heavy-handed tone is a bit annoying today. Well, I hope for your sake that you find it heavy-handed. And then there were lots of other things to do on the side, like blowing up our enemies—we've already mentioned that—but also exploring ultra-well-designed and sometimes even slightly scary stages. Discovering dozens of secrets, and getting beaten up by those bastard drones, too. In any case, I've never seen anything so crazy and well-crafted in the genre. Except Blood, maybe. But that's a different style. Yeah, Blood is way worse (and therefore better) in every way, actually. Except that I still find it just as funny.
I keep saying that Duke Nukem was making me laugh hard (Duc Nuquème, in french by the way). Maybe I should have put it in the funny games category. Except that, in absolute terms, it made all the kids who spent five minutes playing it look ultra cool. But cool thanks to what? Its humor, right? Well, yeah, not only that, but yeah. Oh, I don't know, whatever!
Steam that runs out
The music didn't leave a lasting impression on me, far from it. Maybe I was too busy laughing, or sparing my eardrums the sound of missiles destroying entire buildings. Looking back, I think I can safely say that composer Lee Jackson is not a big music lover. Oh, he studied music at university? He created the soundtracks for fifteen games? He played in orchestras and everything? Well, my apologies for the flawed analysis. I admit that Grabbag, the intro track, tastes like a good steak. An overcooked steak stuffed with GMOs and with a disastrous carbon footprint, but okay. As for the handful of remaining tracks, I find that they end too quickly, sound too heavy, and don't vary enough, giving the impression that they were created between two gritty jokes. Surely it would have been possible to compose songs that were even more rednecky than this? I've never been part of an orchestra myself, so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but I think they could have gone even further with the madness. My nostalgia hates you guys, you bunch of wankers! Well, you'll always find an army of fanatics to worship Lee Jackson's work, and maybe he deserves better than my poorly argued criticism, who knows? It's not my fault that the girls in bikinis, our protagonist's quotes, his magnificent crew cut, and the monsters' flour-covered faces distracted me too much to appreciate the rest. For what it's worth, I'll share the only other piece that evokes anything for me, namely a lot of anxiety and stress. I liked it a lot for that reason, of course, especially in MIDI format, for a minimum of sharpness.
ball... eyes that sparkle, sorry
A year before a great vacation buddy named Stanley Doritos got his hands on Total Annihilation, he too was playing Duke Nukem 3D. He knew it much better than I did, especially when it came to the little details that made this game from another era so famous. Among these famous details was the fact that you could give money to prostitutes scattered throughout most levels... to get them to show their breasts. We're talking about a one-second animation of hyper-pixelated characters. But for preteens raised on 8 and 16-bit sprites like us, it represented a kind of pantheon of lust that was hard to dethrone. Better than watching blurred adult movies through a colander, yeah yeah. And much better than the strip poker game on Randall's Atari ST, yeah yeah yeah. Damn, I have to be careful, I'm starting to talk like I did in 1996. Like good little preteen idiots (no offense, kids, but you're all terrible at that age, and I include myself and my entire generation in that), we tried to place our character at the edge of the activation distance so that the lady would appear as clearly as possible. And we would spend five or ten minutes throwing bills at the screen, shouting “Waaaaaaaah!” every time the coveted boobs appeared. I love the 90s, but there are a lot of things I wish I could forget.
​In any case, the big boss at this game was Randall Geyser. He finished it in every way possible, and in every difficulty mode. He was keeping me the save files right before the final bosses of each stage, just for the fun of spoiling it for me. No, I'm exaggerating. He didn't spoil anything for me, since I hadn't gotten past the halfway point of any of the levels, on Let's Rock difficulty no less. And yes, he also knew about the thing with the bills and the prostitutes. He thought it was cool too, but not enough to spend his day on it. Finally, I also witnessed that unlikely moment when, in the middle of a jetpack rush, he landed in a secret area where a simple message on the wall asked us, “How did you get here?” That really made us laugh! Oh yeah, this game is a blast, I warned you! But, um, sorry, I still preferred the session where Stanley gave tickets to the dancers. Preteens, damn it...
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