DUKE NUKEM 3D

Does the 1996 shooter still kick ass and chew bubblegum?

- By Rick Lane

Of all the totemic first-person shooters released in the '90s, Duke Nukem 3D's legacy is the hardest to pin down. When it released in January 1996, it represented a massive step forward over 1993's Doom in terms of technology, level design, and interactivity. Yet, within six months, Duke Nukem 3D had itself been superseded by Quake, whose true 3D engine marked the beginning of the end for 2.5D shooters.

This could be interpreted as a testament to how fast the game industry of the 1990s moved. But Duke's legacy is questionable in other ways. Both Doom and Quake have a timeless quality to them, whereas Duke 3D is aggressively of its time. Doom and Quake both have extensive family trees, while Duke's sole descendant was a disappointment over a decade in the making. Many of Duke's innovations, such as its responsive game world, didn't have the staying power anticipated at the time.

Even technologically, the engines that powered the decade's most influential shooters—Doom, Quake, Half-Life, and Unreal, still form the foundations of modern rendering tech, whereas the Build Engine powered three or four notable games and was, ironically, never really built upon.

As such, Duke Nukem 3D is a curious island in the FPS ocean, a vestigial limb left behind by the thrust of the genre's evolution. Yet, this is also what makes it intriguing to revisit, as there isn't really another shooter like Duke Nukem 3D. For better and worse, 3D Realms' most famous work bristles with 'what if?' potential. It's filled with ideas that were sadly never carried forward, as well as attitudes that, mercifully, never prevailed.

LET'S ROCK

Even when it released, you could have made a case that