From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

Duke Nukem 3D - The Early Stages of Urban Resistance
Why the opening stages of 3D Realms' evolutionary first-person shooter impacted me in a big way and brought me back again and again.

As he'd been doing ever since I picked up that Atari 2600 controller for the first time, my brother, James, was actively pushing me to try new new things. He was encouraging me to act upon my newfound interest in PC gaming and begin exploring its seemingly boundless world.

He rightfully suspected, though, that blindly adventuring into the vast unknown was an intimidating prospect for someone like me, who had always needed to be shown the way forward, so he thought to nudge me in the direction of a certain game. It was one that he described to be comfortably old-school and familiar yet still enlighteningly illustrative of modern PC values.

Basically, he knew that I loved Doom and its sequels, so he suggested that I go online and hunt down a game called "Duke Nukem 3D," which, according to him, was a similarly acclaimed first-person shooter and a game that evolved the genre in some important ways.

At the time, I knew next to nothing about Duke Nukem 3D, so I assumed that everything James told me was correct and consequently took interest in the game. (I had seen images of Duke, himself, as he was depicted in the game's title art, but I couldn't derive from them any concept of the game's subject-matter beyond "cool, masculine hero shoots things with big guns.")

However, I didn't feel compelled to immediately log in to AOL and begin scouring the Internet in search of Duke Nukem 3D because, quite honestly, I wasn't really much of a fan of first-person shooters beyond Doom. I mean, I'd played other shooters like Heretic and Hexen: Beyond Heretic, but none of them were able to convince me that their developers had found a way to meaningfully advance the genre. I came away from them with the impression that the Doom series had peaked so spectacularly at the outset that it had left the genre nowhere to go from there but down.

They simply weren't as good as Doom. They were, I felt, inferior iterations of it.

So I figured that there was little chance that the umpteenth Doom clone, no matter how popular it was said to be, would change my opinion that I should simply stick to Doom if I was hungry for some top-tier shooting action. For that reason, I refrained from seeking out Duke Nukem 3D and turned my attention to other games.

Several weeks later, during a down period, Duke Nukem 3D's name suddenly popped back into my mind. That's when I finally decided to download the shareware version of it. I dug it out of AOL's aging "Download Center," and I did so with the assumption that I'd apathetically demo two or three of its "likely curtailed" introductory stages and then quickly discard it in favor of heading back to AOL's wrestling chat to talk about important happenings from that past Monday's RAW (you know--all of the lovely "traditional" pro-wrestling concepts like father-on-daughter incest, human sacrifice, necrophilia, and attempted castration).

 

I wasn't going into Duke Nukem 3D with the intent to be critical of it as much as I was looking to find fault with it and thus reinforce my preconceived notion that it likely couldn't measure up to Doom. So right away I started searching for things to be annoyed about.

The first game element that I complained about was the free-look camera, which immediately stood out to me as something that unnecessarily complicated the action. Looking up and down required additional keyboard input beyond just number keys and the space bar, and doing it required more dexterity than my joystick-trained hands could manage (I'd had trouble with keyboard controls ever since my Commodore 64 days).

Also, it opened up the possibility of combat on the vertical axis, which I feared would cause me a lot of problems. And it certainly did: The process of countering aerial enemies was, as I'd guessed, complicated in execution, and whenever I'd attempt to engage an aerial enemy, I'd spaz out as I desperately struggled to locate the correct keyboard keys and deal with the mouse's frenetic movements, which would prevent me from accurately aiming the targeting reticule.

I just couldn't handle action on the vertical axis. It was too much for me.

Furthermore, I was bothered by the requirement of having to stop and look around because I felt as though it broke the flow of the action and prevented the game from having a natural run-and-gun rhythm.

"The free-look camera is antithetical to Doom's ease of navigability and sense of accessibility," I thought, "and I simply don't care for its inclusion and the type of gameplay that it invites."

Also, I wasn't keen on the idea that I could be continuously shot by hovering enemies that were placed so far out of view that my merely stopping to look around for them would be a recipe for losing 90% of my health!

The game was filled with these types of surprises, and their recurrence almost drove me away from the game. I continued playing only because the game thankfully retained Doom's line-of-sight damage mechanic, which helped to mitigate some of the issues that I was having with the controls (if an enemy was visible onscreen, my shots would connect with it regardless of whether or not it was in range of the reticule).

But before long, my mood started to change, and it did so because the experience wasn't really playing out like I thought it would. I figured that I'd continue to find additional problems and treat them as further proof that Duke Nukem 3D was an inferior game, but that wasn't what was happening, no.

Rather, as I was exploring the game's opening stage, my focus started to shift, and soon I was in a position in which the only thing that I cared to do was examine the stage's environments and level design and take note of how cool and interesting they were. And as I was doing this, I found that my cynicism was slowly being supplanted by an excited curiosity.

And that's when it became clear to me that I was suddenly becoming engrossed in Duke Nukem's world.

As I've stated countless times in the past, I've always had a thing for cityscape backgrounds and abandoned-city settings and the types of imagination-stirring atmospheres that they produced, and Duke Nukem 3D, to my great delight, was packed with such backgrounds and settings.

This was evident to me from the start of the first mission, in which Duke's flying vehicle was shot down and he escaped to an unoccupied rooftop whose eerily muted atmosphere conveyed to me that I was experiencing an uneasy calm before a violent storm. From this safe position, it was easy for me to look around and immerse myself in the setting and drink in its eye-catching background: a silent cityscape whose looming, shadowy presence served to heighten the tension and otherwise provide me some all-important environmental context.

There was a noticeable lack of music, which I assumed to be a conscious design choice (it wasn't, I learned later on; the music was simply omitted from the shareware version of the game), but I didn't mind that there was. Rather, I liked that the designers allowed for the game's settings to speak for themselves and take on the job of providing storyline context and describing the state of the world.

"This approach works in the game's favor," I felt. "It helps the player to more easily form a conception of the game's world and get a sense of its atmosphere in a completely unobstructed way."

In fact, every time I played the full-featured version, I voluntarily switched off the music and allowed for the game's imagination-stirring environments and noises--the trailing sounds of distant planes and disturbing howls, both of which were of unknown origin and thus desirably eerie and unease-inducing--to do their work and create what I felt was the essential atmosphere for an abandoned-city setting.

I felt, also, that the unnerving earthquakes, startling explosions, and sudden structural failures (collapsing buildings, mainly) were so much more pronounced and impactful when their thunderous conveyances went uninterrupted by the game's rock music, whose overpowering presence only served to neutralize and diminish them.

"Playing Duke Nukem 3D without the music is the best way to experience it," I maintained.

And I still feel that way.

I didn't play through the entire shareware episode that day because, really, I didn't need to. The first two missions, on their own, were enough to convince that Duke Nukem 3D was well worth my time.

I absolutely adored everything about those opening stages. They were instantly classic to me, and I considered each of their 3D urban settings to be one of the most amazingly designed, convincingly rendered settings I'd ever seen in a game.

In Duke Nukem 3D, every single environmental detail--every meticulously designed room, every personality-filled texture, and every piece of specially crafted furniture--had a purpose and meant a whole lot to the stage that it helped to form. It told you something interesting about the game's world and consequently worked to further immerse you. This, I couldn't help but note, was a contrast to Doom, whose halls and corridors tended to be plain-looking and purely functional in design and thus samey-looking; they didn't have as much personality or character as Duke Nukem 3D's environments.

Duke Nukem 3D's variety of environments, in comparison, was astonishing. In its stages, a deserted city street or a hallway could spill into any from a large list of distinct-looking locations, be it a restroom, a movie theater, an arcade, a magazine shop, a bar, or a strip club. And each location was as fun to observe and examine as it was to traverse.

And access points to buildings weren't always limited to those that were clearly visible, no. There were plenty of secret entrances, too!

I loved the entire process of finding secret entrances. I loved that it was possible to walk across buildings' ledges and fly high up into the air with my jetpack and search for penetrable exteriors (or "furiously hug walls and press up against surfaces," as secret-hunting works in practice) and thus gain access to hidden apartments and office spaces that contained some of the game's best weapons and items.

In Duke Nukem 3D, searching for secret areas was a huge part of the fun and the best excuse to spend more time exploring the game's highly engrossing, wonder-inducing stages.

Duke Nukem 3D felt more alive than Doom. Its environments were constantly transforming around me: Scripted events, like sudden earthquakes, would cause noticeable ground-rupturing or the crumbling of walls, whose freshly cut openings would often provide me access to series of newly traversable spaces! Blowing up a fire extinguisher or a set of propane tanks would yield a similar result, but doing so would, in addition, cause a loud, pulse-raising chain reaction of explosions that would absolutely level an entire room and leave all of its furnishings and devices in a state of disrepair! And an entire building or structure would spectacularly collapse out of nowhere, and its torn-up remnants would turn into a whole new stage section!

"Nothing like that ever happened in the Doom games!" I'd excitedly think to myself every time I'd witness such an occurrence.

Also, Duke Nukem 3D's stages had a flow that felt more organic than its inspiration's. In Doom, you'd obtain a keycard and then have to backtrack across the entire stage to find the color-coded door that it opened, which would take a long time if you couldn't remember where the door was; but in Duke Nukem 3D, the level design was more compact (despite the stages' appearing to be complexly structured and sprawling), so it was usually the case that keycards were placed in proximity to their corresponding doors.

That would be true even in instances in which a keycard seemed to be far away from its corresponding door. When you'd pick it up, a triggered event, like a resulting explosion, would tear open a hole in a nearby wall or the floor and create convenient path to the door that it opened.

So you were never left feeling as though you were lost in a complex labyrinth and potentially stuck. You were always progressing forward.

And the game's abundance of secret areas converged in much the same way. You'd spend ten minutes working your way through a system of caverns, feeling as though you were traveling along a lengthy divergent path that would ultimately lead you to disaster, and then, suddenly, you'd emerge from an aperture and somehow arrive right back at the point of divergence or even a adjacent room that you never knew was there!

So Duke Nukem 3D definitely had the edge in this area.

And I was amazed by how interactive Duke Nukem 3D's world was in comparison to Doom's. Part of the fun of exploring each of its stages was approaching every object in sight and pressing the action button to see if my doing so would trigger an event or prompt Duke to utter some type of silly pun or sarcastic remark. And in a great many instances, I was able to get Duke to manipulate an object, comment on it, or even do both at the same time!

If I brushed up against a urinal, he'd use it and subsequently express a feeling of bladder-emptying relief, and resultantly he'd regain some health. If I broke open a fire hydrant and moved near it, he'd be able to drink the water that was gushing from it and restore his health point-by-point. If I looked in a mirror, he'd see his reflection and compliment himself. And if I tried to play a Duke Nukem-themed arcade machine, he'd stop me from doing so by stating that he had no time to "play with himself."

That's how it was in Duke Nukem 3D: If you could see something, you could probably interact with it!

My personal favorite interactable object was the pool table in the second stage. It actually allowed you to knock around its balls and make them collide with each other! And what was more impressive was that it had its own physics system and therein collision-force and geometry that were more realistic-feeling than they had any right to be!

It even permitted me to sink shots and clear the entire table! And that was something that sent me a powerful message and told me a whole lot about the people who designed the game. It spoke of how remarkably ambitious they were. And it conveyed that theirs was a passionate effort to build a memorable world and imbue all of its elements with a considerable degree of authenticity.

And as a result, Duke Nukem 3D's stages felt like living, breathing entities, and they were, much like the game's protagonist, loaded with vigor, personality, and humorous spirit.

Duke Nukem 3D was one of those games whose true depth couldn't be perceived in only a couple of play-throughs, no. You had to play it for years to get a real sense of how much content and substance it actually had.

I didn't know until the mid-2000s, for instance, that you could locate the bloody remains of Doom's protagonist in the third stage's chapel area. When Duke would catch sight of him, he'd joke, "Damn--that's one doomed space marine!" before using his boot to splatter what was left of the corpse. I wouldn't call this an homage to Doom, because it has some spiteful energy to it, but still it's a cool little reference to the game that directly inspired Duke Nukem 3D!)

And more recently, I discovered that you can find Indiana Jones' lifeless body hanging from a cavern wall in Hotel Hell, the first episode's eight mission!

Why? Who knows! Let's just say that Duke Nukem 3D doesn't consider anything sacred and will never miss the opportunity to gleefully mock and tear down the entertainment industry's biggest icons. That's one of the personality quirks that makes it what it is.

And I'm sure that there are even more secrets and references to discover and that I'll still be finding new things even decades from now.

The other memorable aspect of the game was Duke, himself, and his reactions to what was happening around him. He had quips and one-liners for all occasions, and many of them were taken from the era's biggest action flicks, which was great for me because I was always down for a game of Spot the Reference. And Duke certainly kept me engaged in that sense with his constant utterings of 80s and 90s pop-culture references.

I mean, sure: Most of his references were vulgar in nature, and a lot of the comments that he made (like those that he directed toward strippers and such) were just plain juvenile (I'm unoffendable, so none of them ever bothered me), but that type of behavior is what helped him to stand out as a character. He immersed you in the action with his wit and personality and kept you engaged by making you wonder what silly or facetious comment he'd make next.

Those other shooting-game heroes were only capable of mustering a few grunts and generic-sounding death cries, whereas the sardonic Duke Nukem would never miss the chance to express his pain with a sarcastic quip or joyously congratulate himself for blowing a pig cop's corpse to smithereens.

When Duke let out a blood-curdling scheme, it meant something. You knew, right then, that it was time to retreat or die. That was the power of his conveyance.

He, unlike other shooting-game heroes, was a crucial element of his game.

And the more I played Duke Nukem 3D, the more I came to embrace its advancements and the types of gameplay that they opened up. I enjoyed traversing its sloped surfaces, swimming around its large pools of liquid (but only when I had to do so on a limited basis, of course), and engaging in aerial combat with the cool new jetpack, whose use, in addition, provided me an ideal alternative to using the free-look camera to bring flying and higher-placed enemies into view.

I really liked, also, the game's newly introduced jumping and crouching mechanics and the genuinely interesting platforming challenges that their presence inspired. I had a lot of fun jumping onto and moving between spinning crushers, crouch-walking beneath trip lasers, platforming my way around box piles, tactically throwing myself into the grasp of cranes' claws and using them as transportation, leaping across precariously shaky ground, carefully trekking across broken bridges, and flying from rooftop to rooftop while avoiding projectile storms.

You couldn't do interesting stuff like this in the Doom games. Because they didn't have any real "platforming challenges." Their action was almost entirely ground-based. That's why Duke Nukem 3D's level design felt next-level in comparison.

So in truth, Duke Nukem 3D was a multi-genre game. It was about mowing down reptilian aliens and pig cops, yeah, but it was also about engaging in precision platforming and solving puzzles. It invited me to use not just the tactics that I learned while I was playing Doom but also the platforming and puzzle-solving skills that I developed in the decades in which I was playing Mario and Mega Man games.

It was, as I came to understand, evolutionary in multiple ways.

It borrowed a lot from Doom, sure: It copied its basic look and presentation. It had very similar sound design (it contained a lot of the same stock sound effects, and it used sound propagation to convey the snortling of unseen creatures and consequently create a familiar sense of foreboding). It had the same weapon system. Its music (which I didn't hear until years later) was created in the same style, which is to say that its soundtrack was comprised of hard-rock tunes that had an underlying sinister energy to them (honestly, though, I find its music to be a bit generic-sounding and thus nowhere near as memorable as Doom's). And its systems of progression (activating switches and using color-coded keys to open doors) were total replications (though, Duke Nukem 3D expanded on the systems with novel additions like combination locks, sequenced switches, and other kinds of advanced triggers).

But still, it wasn't a shameless clone of Doom, no. Rather, it used Doom as a foundation and expanded upon the latter's formula in cool and unique ways while introducing enough meaningfully new material (swimming, flying via jetpack, platforming, and creative new weapons like the shrink ray and the freezethrower) to separate itself and have its own unique identity.

Duke Nukem 3D was largely the product of its own ambition.

More than anything, I enjoyed examining its environments and admiring the effort that went into crafting them. After I finished clearing a stage of all of its enemies, I'd spend five or maybe ten minutes re-exploring the stage, and in that time, I'd eagerly search for secret areas, attempt to interact with even the tiniest of objects (I loved that it was possible to kick and shatter wineglasses!), and generally soak in and absorb the stage's entrancingly desolate atmosphere.

For me, engaging in those types of activities was also an essential part of the Duke Nukem 3D experience. They were part of what made it so fun to play.

If I were to talk about games that ooze atmosphere and inspire me to immerse yourself in their worlds, I'd have to put Duke Nukem 3D near the top of my list. Its opening stages are a great lesson in how to do it. I wish that I could use this space to depict all of their environments and display them from every angle so that I could more deeply elaborate on their most meaningful details, but I can't do that because there's simply too much to show, and this piece is already long enough.

So let's just say that Duke Nukem 3D's opening stages are a masterclass in using atmosphere to immerse the player and consistently evoke feelings of wonder.

I so thoroughly enjoyed playing those opening stages (Hollywood Holocaust, Red Light District and Death Row) that I never desired to go out and buy myself a full copy of Duke Nukem 3D. There was no point in doing so, I felt, because the shareware version, with its eight considerably lengthy stages, was packed with so much satisfying content that it was good enough to be a standalone game!

But usually I'd return to Duke Nukem 3D only to play through its opening three stages. They were really the only ones that were able to strongly capture my imagination and deeply immerse me in the action. The rest just weren't as impactful.

Because I felt that way, I didn't buy the full retail version of Duke Nukem 3D until about eight years later.

I didn't know what Duke Nukem 3D's second and third episodes entailed until I played through them in the N64 version of the game (whose title was of course "Duke Nukem 64"), which James randomly purchased one day because, well, that's what he did. He liked to impulsively buy games and introduce them into my game libraries when I wasn't looking. (Read my earliest Memory Bank pieces to learn more about his curious activities.)

From what I could tell, the N64 version was pretty much identical to the PC original (it even had the same noticeable lack of music, which I still believed to be a conscious design choice!). "How interesting," I thought. Because at the time, I thought it was weird for a pseudo-3D FPS to appear on an advanced polygon-producing machine like the N64. I was surprised that Nintendo, which had become obsessed with next-level 3D technology, was allowing for its console to host a game that was outdated visually.

And it seemed even more strange to me that the company had pursued a game that was known for being hyper-violent! "Since when does it do that?" I wondered.

At first, just as I had in the previous years, I didn't play past its first episode. But in this instance, I refrained from doing so for a much different reason: I found the N64 controls to be too confusing and uncomfortable. None of the four optional control schemes made any sense to me--particularly those that used the C buttons for character movement--and I was never able to fully adapt to any of them. And I felt that I wasn't going to have fun time in the second and third episodes, which were likely more, if I couldn't adequately control how Duke moved.

Otherwise, I once again struggled with the free-look camera, which felt as unwieldly as ever. I had trouble cycling through weapons with buttons (and consequently suffered through more spaz-out moments in which I frantically pounded the weapon-cycle button, forgot that there were other weapons between the chain gun and the pistol, and wound up blowing myself up with a rocket). And a lot of the time, I couldn't figure out which buttons activated my special items (even after consulting the game's manual).

I simply couldn't find a way to adequately control the game's action. So I decided to abandon it and stick with the old PC shareware version.

Though, I was able to extract some from value from the N64 at one point. I did so during the latter years of the console's life, at a time when James and I would frequently get together and play multiplayer N64 games (like Mario Kart 64 and Hexen).

In fact, some of my best memories of Duke Nukem 3D are derived from the night-long sessions in which James and I would play through an entire episode of the game in split-screen mode (the best part of doing so was not having to worry about quick-saving all of the time, because in multiplayer mode, a fallen Duke would simply respawn elsewhere). We'd stay up until early in the morning and continue playing until our brains turned to mush and we could no longer see straight (split-screen gaming was tough on the eyes even when it was being done on a big-screen TV)!

We made it to the final boss, the Cycloid Emperor, a couple of times, but I don't believe that we were ever able to defeat it (my memories of the fight are kinda blurry, which makes sense considering how tired we were by the end of each play-through). The only thing that I remember clearly is that the fight took place on a football field and that we were so incapable of retaining ammo that we had to resort to running up close to the boss and engaging him in what can only be called "shin-kicking contests." Naturally we lost each one of them and got squished.

But we really didn't care about beating the game or exhibiting great FPS skills, no. All that mattered to us was that we had a lot of fun with the game and enjoyed our time together.

Really, I couldn't have asked for anything more.

The first Duke Nukem game that I bought for myself was actually Duke Nukem: Zero Hour, which was released exclusively for the N64. I recall being deeply engrossed in the game, but for whatever reason, I'm not able to remember much about it outside of its excellent boat level and its Jack the Ripper fight, which was really tough. I'd like to play it again and get the chance to refresh my memory, and that's why I'm wishfully hoping that Nintendo will get serious about securing third-party N64 games for its online services and bug whoever owns the rights to the game to re-release it digitally.

And back in 2010, I picked up Duke Nukem 3D: Atomic Edition, which was an upgraded version of the original game. It had the usual "graphical enhancements" (which was old PC-shooter lingo that simply translated to "it now has a smoothing filter and darkened color schemes"), but more importantly, it contained a newly added fourth episode called "The Birth."

I played through it a couple of times, and I was impressed with it in every instance. I greatly enjoyed its fourth episode, and I was especially fond of new stages like Duke-Burger and Shop-N-Bag, both of which had extremely memorable visuals and brilliant level design. Most of the new stages were more labyrinthine in structure, and they had a distinctly investigative feel to them, and that made them stand out to me. I felt that they were the types of stages that Duke Nukem 3D was truly made for.

I was a fan of everything that Atomic Edition added save for one of the new enemies: the Protector Drone. Its attack were really annoying (I hated how it would shrink me down and then unfailingly squish me as I was attempting to recover), it was far too aggressive, and it was way too much of a bullet-sponge for such a low-level enemy. Though, honestly, its presence was nothing more than a mere annoyance, and it didn't really do anything to dampen my experience.

And these days, I continue to enjoy Duke Nukem 3D via Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary Word Tour, which contains all of Atomic Edition's content and introduces a brand-new fifth episode called "Alien World Order." I purchased it back in 2020, and I've been revisiting it regularly ever since then. It's my go-to version of the game, and I'm certain that it'll retain that status for a long, long time.

At some point, I'd like to finish exploring Apogee's back catalogue of DOS games and particularly its side-scrolling Duke Nukem games, whose existence was a total surprise to me. I didn't know anything about Duke's earlier adventures until I read up on them sometime in 2002. And 23 years later, it still seems strange to me that the smack-talkin', vulgarity-spewing Duke actually started out as a rather tame, inoffensive platforming hero.

When I play the original Duke Nukem, I have trouble reconciling the differences between the old and new versions of Duke. It feels wrong to me that he doesn't chuckle at enemies' misfortune or threaten to rip them a new one.

"This version of the character is simply too well-mannered," I always think.

For me, the true Duke Nukem will always be the rude, crude dude that I first encountered on that rooftop back in 1999. And whenever I hear his name, my mind will, in every instance, become filled with images of that dark, foreboding cityscape; those tall, wonder-inducing beige-colored buildings; and all of the creatively designed, immersive environments that I traversed and explored many times over.

Each time I return to his game, I'll be reminded of my earliest experience with it. I'll be reminded of the indelible first impression that it made on me and how completely entranced I was by its visual and atmospheric qualities (which I find to be even more nostalgic than Doom's!). And as I guide him through those iconic opening stages, I'll be filled with the same feelings of nostalgia and wonder, and I'll no doubt enjoy many hours of fun shooting action.

If you were to ask me to choose between Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, I'd have a hard time doing so. I'd have to think about it for a while. My gut feeling is that I'd probably pick Doom and do so because I have a preference for less-complicated control schemes and I feel that its subsequent episodes are superior to Duke Nukem 3D's. For me, simplicity tends to win out.

The only thing that I can say for sure is that the race between them would be very close and the winner would achieve victory by the slimmest of margins.

That's how highly I think of Duke Nukem 3D: I consider it to be a close equal to the legendary game that inspired it, and I think of it not as the second-best in its class but rather as the other "best first-person shooter ever."

And because I feel that way, there's only one thing that I can do:

Hail to the king, baby!