749: Duke Nukem 3D | Retronauts

This week on Retronauts, we brought enough gum for the whole class.

Hello, everybody.

Welcome to another episode of Retronauts.

I'm your host for this one, Bob Mackie.

And this week we are talking about a subject previously untouched by Retronauts the extremely innovative 1996 first-person shooter Duke Nukem 3D.

This game arrived just as the genre was making a full transition into fully polygonal 3D, but Duke more than made up for it with its personality and sheer variety of interactions, and a lot of attitude as well.

So unfortunately, the well has really been poisoned by Duke Nukem Forever, that 2011 abomination.

But on this episode we can at least remember the good times, because Duke Nukem 3D is an amazing game.

So yes, I'm Bob Mackie.

Who else is here with me today on the podcast?

Hi there, I'm Stuart Jupp, and I don't have time nor inclination to play with myself at this moment.

And Stuart's camera is off, so we can't be sure about that.

Oh, God.

I just want to note that to the listener.

Who else is here with us today?

Hi, I'm Dominic Tarrison, a regular at PC Gamer and many other sites, and retro FBSs are a passion.

Excellent.

And who else?

Who's our final guest?

Yes, and I'm John Linneman from Digital Foundry, who is a known lover of retro-style shooters, so I am happy to be here.

Yes, thanks, Stuart.

Obviously, I've worked with you before but, Dominic and John, you are new to one of my podcasts at least, so welcome.

It's great to have you on.

Thank you, thank you.

And before we get started here, I want to ground a discussion in our own experience.

So let's go around this virtual room here.

What is our history with Duke Nukem and his 3D world?

Let us start with Stuart.

Well, when I was a kid, my first PC had the shareware version of the 2D Duke Nukem.

Though I think my first encounter with it was a friend who owned the shareware for Duke Nukem 3D, which I found to be astonishingly scandalous.

I had never seen anything quite like it.

And there was that sense of taboo about it.

And in my memory, there's nudity in the game, but there isn't.

It cemented itself that way.

So when I did come to play it later in my life, when it started receiving source ports and such, I was kind of taken aback at how tame it was compared to my memory of it.

And Dominic, how about you?

Yeah, I played it right as the original shareware version was coming out.

My parents generally did not care what I was playing games-wise.

I started with Wolfenstein and Doom and Catacomb Abyss before that.

But I remember my dad... who was tech-savvy.

He was the one who got all the hardware in the household and he was impressed at the technology, the collapsing buildings, the interactivity of the environments.

He kind of just shrugged at the ridiculous macho action man stylings and it was being able to just do these little interactive things like knock around the pool table with the balls on the pool table or like break every single bottle on in a bar was what stood out to like him and me at the time.

And to this day, I think it kind of defined all Build Engine games.

That is true.

And John, how about you?

Yeah, so I actually bought this not long after the official release.

I did not get the shareware due to lack of internet access, but I played this on our Packard Bell 486 66 megahertz.

I convinced my parents to upgrade from 4 megabytes to 20 megabytes of RAM specifically because I wanted to play this game.

And I saved up gift certificates to a store called Media Play, which was rather popular at the time in the 90s bought the the big box version, which i still have to this day, and it didn't run amazing on that machine, but like the level of interactivity, as everyone has mentioned, and just like the fluidity of the animation and just it just felt like really like, truly like a next generation experience.

I mean, i was already into doom and whatnot and stuff like dark forces and all, but this genuinely felt like a big upgrade and seeing that i was on a 486,

Playing Quake at the time was basically impossible, so I went with Duke instead.

Yeah, it sounds like we have a lot of similar stories, because my story is I got this game for Christmas of 1996, so I missed the shareware.

We got our first family computer in summer of 1996 and I made a friend in high school and he told me there is a game with boobs in it and swear words and he showed me what I think was the shareware of Duke Nukem 3D and he got really mad when I let him know that's not actual nudity.

Those women are wearing pasties, so whoever told you this game had nudity lied to you.

But Once you get beyond the nudity and the swear words, like we're all saying here, what was really charming about the game is just how interactive it was.

Just all the little things you could fiddle with that were not quite on the table for the FPS at this point in time.

And also the depiction of...

To put it broadly, real-life settings.

The movie theater and the bank and the porno store aren't that realistic.

But we weren't seeing those kind of things in video games quite yet.

So that was very charming as well.

So I got beyond the superficial badass content and then dug into the actual meat of the game and was just very bowled over by just how much you could do in the game and how clever all the level designs were.

And yeah, I have a lot of fondness for this.

I'm ashamed that we have never covered Duke Nukem 3D.

But I will say, like I said in my intro, Duke Nukem Forever really tainted this brand in unimaginable ways.

And I feel like I don't want to take up much space in this episode by continually bringing that up.

But when you look at any interview about Duke Nukem 3D...

I swear maybe half of it is taken up by what happened to forever and why did it turn out so bad?

And they don't want to talk about.

This game, which a lot of people have forgotten, is really good and worth discussing.

I think another major factor, just very briefly, is this is a game that has character.

And you are a character.

You are Duke Nukem.

That's like inarguable.

In Doom, you're a Marine, sure.

You're B.J.

Blazkowicz in Wolfenstein.

But that's just like whatever.

This is a guy who talks.

He talks about what he's seeing.

He is there.

The world has character to match him.

And it's just, it's still enormous fun.

It's really enormous fun.

There was a bit of that in Dark Forces, I might argue.

You did play as Kyle Katarn, right?

But it was nowhere near the level of Duke 3D.

Yeah, in Dark Forces, Kyle got like two or three voice lines per level, but Duke just talks.

Exactly.

Like, will react with one-liners whenever you blow up an enemy.

Yeah, this was not happening in 1996 on a game, I believe, that just originally shipped on floppy disks.

This was not an initial CD-ROM release, correct?

Or was it floppy and CD-ROM?

I believe it was CD-ROM out of the gate.

My initial copy was definitely on a CD-ROM, but it was still I mean it was in like the 30-something megabyte range, which is still pretty big for a floppy-based title.

Yeah, I was imagining it was a floppy-based game because those sound effects are just so compressed.

I'm wondering, like, man, they could have upped the bitrate on this.

Yeah, they probably could have pulled off a floppy version, but the disc also included shareware games on it, as you do.

So it was a good value.

Well, yeah, let's get into that.

The history of Duke Nukem 3D goes back to shareware.

So we have to discuss Duke Nukem 2D, a world that was unknown to me when I was playing this game for the first time.

I had no idea there were these side-scrolling games because, like I said, I cannonballed into the world of PC gaming in 1996.

So I was just discovering a lot of things for the first time.

And the story of Duke Nukem goes all the way back to 1987 by Apogee Software.

That is the developer of the original games.

And it was founded by Scott Miller.

And Apogee did not invent the concept of share, where other software releases and game releases had been doing this.

But they really popularized this method of distribution because Apogee would give you essentially a third of a game to chew on.

And then the offer was on the table like, do you want to play more?

And usually the answer was yes, because...

You had sunk enough time into that game to want to see the end.

And I feel like that's not back in a complete way.

But I feel like these extended demos we're seeing these days is kind of an echo of that, because there will be a demo for a game that you can play like three hours or 10 hours.

And that is substantial.

And that would actually like, oh, I can import my save.

Well, then, yes, I'm on for the full ride.

Yeah, I've seen a growing number of demos that are kind of returning to the old shareware style format of like offering, like the entire first third of the game.

I mean, a big part of my childhood were those CDs that you could buy from like office supply stores that had maybe 40 or 50 shareware games on there.

And Duke Nukem, even if you don't buy the full game, it's putting the brand in your mind.

It's making you associate it with fun.

So I think that worked on me.

I mean, I became an Apogee fan, sicko in a way.

So things like Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure.

I love Biomenace, which recently got an excellent remaster, and the original Duke Nukem, which I do think is a really, really enjoyable game.

It's been I want to mention it very quickly it has been remastered, but at the moment it's only on the Evercade, which I mean it's kind of the killer app for the Evercade as far as I'm concerned, and I really hope it's coming to other systems at some point.

While true Stuart, you can actually download, I think, the Regal engine.

Yes.

Which is what the Evergate runs on and use it on a PC.

So there is that.

I thought that was only for Duke 2 so far, which I like.

Duke 2 is the one I'm thinking about because I actually did own Duke 2 back in the day.

And it was simply because we got a family PC.

I guess it was early 94, late 93.

Yeah.

And I was just like interested in testing that, right?

Like I'd played console games and I was like, all right, what can I do on a PC?

And I love platform games.

So I started exploring them.

And although I did enjoy Duke Nukem 2 I mean even as a kid I recognized like this is very choppy right.

It runs at like 20 FPS and doing side scrolling on the PC in general was very, very difficult because it was more of a frame buffer based setup as opposed to having dedicated hardware for scrolling backgrounds.

So compared to like the Genesis or Super NES, this felt pretty outdated, but it's still a lot of fun.

Yeah, I sort of made do, really.

This is what I had, so I made do and mended.

But I do have a lot of love for that original, as choppy as it is, as crushed as it is and as cute as it is with all its little ideas.

It's just a lovely game and I'll go back to it fairly frequently just to do a couple of levels of those PC speaker blasting noises.

Well, yeah, Apogee developed and published games like Commander Keen and the original Duke Nukem.

They were popular for offering, in a way, console style gameplay on the PC.

And if you go read the book Masters of Doom, which is great, it really explains how id Software unlocked that kind of capability on the PC, which was not built for fast side scrolling gameplay.

It's why PC games were often adventure games or RPGs at the time.

But I guess John Carmack and his bros figured out a way to kind of make this work on the PC.

It actually got better with jazz Jackrabbit.

If you remember that that was a few that it managed to run at a full frame rate like a console game.

So it was extremely well programmed, but like the benefit of PC and the reason they went with adventure games is that because it uses like a frame buffer, you could arbitrarily draw whatever you want to the screen.

Right.

Whereas on a game console, you always hear about tiles, right?

It's a tile map.

So due to the way that that hardware works, you can only use X amount of tiles per screen.

So you end up with a lot more repetitive elements on screen.

So doing this full screen, beautiful backgrounds like in a LucasArts game not really possible on those machines.

Yeah, Jazz Jackrabbit definitely.

Maybe a few years after these initial releases?

It was 94.

So it was like maybe a year or less between Duke 2 and Jazz, but yeah.

It was as fast as Sonic the Hedgehog based on the demos I played.

It was like a very speedy game.

Yeah, very fast, but with a gun.

Yes, we didn't give sonic a gun until 2005.

Yes, exactly very fast to its territory, like you could move as fast as sonic the hedgehog, and unfortunately that meant that you had like a tenth of a second to react to each enemy flying on screen.

Yes, it was a real bubsy issue, is what we call it in the business, but it did have that music to justify it, really.

Oh yeah, Back to Duke though.

These games, in terms of their personality, don't really resemble the Duke Nukem 3D.

We know and love that well.

They feel like more of a parody of superhero comics, because we have a Duke Nukem with a big, toothy grin and a big chin and no sunglasses and

Still some like light, cheeky subversive elements, but not anything like the you know the gum chewing sunglasses wearing cursing figure we know and love today.

And I guess there was some kind of copyright issue, initially because they made Duke Nukem and then they realized oh crap, there is a villain on this series called Captain Planet, whose name is Duke Nukem, played by Dean Stockwell, by the way.

And I guess over time that shook out that the cartoon villain and the video game hero were so distinct that there was no need for a cease and desist.

So they were able to carry on the Duke Nukem legacy.

And now we've all forgotten about the Dean Stockwell villain.

I had to look him up to see what he looked like.

The only reason anyone knows about him is because of this Duke Nukem.

It's the only time he comes up.

It's interesting, though, because the original Duke, too, actually has some voice lines as well.

For Duke, like during the introduction scene where he's like, I am back.

Yeah.

The character obviously hadn't been defined yet, so it's nothing like what we see in 3D.

It's sort of like, what if Arnold Schwarzenegger looked like Dolph Lundgren?

And that was the running concept for Duke.

Exactly, exactly.

Just kind of the extreme hedonistic narcissist.

I love him very much.

And I'm very sad that they ruined him.

Yeah, just before we started recording, I was describing Duke as Johnny Bravo's slightly sleazier cousin.

Yes.

And I just looked that up, and Johnny Bravo came out one year later after Duke.

I say we need to investigate this.

They grew his hair out.

They gave him a tighter t-shirt.

Lost the guns.

Oh, he's got guns, Bob.

Oh, that's true.

Yeah, he's constantly flexing in the intro.

What am I saying?

Well, the creators of Duke Nukem, the original Duke Nukem, are Apogee's Todd Rapogle and Alan Bloom.

The title of the first game had the working title Heavy Metal, but they decided to go for a comic book approach and name it after the character, which was smart, because Heavy Metal very generic.

Possibly another copyright dispute would have been involved by the heavy metal people, the magazine and the film.

And eventually Apogee invented the sub-label 3D Realms for their 3D releases.

But they knew which way the wind was blowing and eventually that name became the default for the studio.

And ultimately it didn't really matter that much because, outside of helping craft and launch the original Max Payne, the 21st century was a real disaster for them.

And I'm guessing that was both due to the development of Prey the original Prey and Duke Nukem Forever.

So honestly, we can do a 3D Realms episode at some point, Apogee 3D Realms, but...

They don't really persist that long as a relevant gaming company past the 90s.

Duke.

Number 3D, I think, is the height of their power, the height of their popularity and impact in the gaming industry.

So yeah, just a little background on Duke, just so you know where he came from the 2D character that was transformed into a 25D badass.

And in terms of the development, there's actually not a whole lot out there about the development of this game.

I think it's because, like I said earlier, Forever really poisoned the well when it comes to talking about 3D.

But the 1996 release date also means there was not a lot of online coverage.

And if there was any, it has been erased from existence or it's very, very tricky to find.

So, yeah, unfortunately, Forever does take a lot of air out of the room.

And I think we're just getting past the point where we can only talk about Duke 3D because, weirdly enough, we are recording this podcast on the day the original shareware launched.

And this morning, I believe the 3D Realms YouTube account put out a video that's a retrospective.

And I think only 10 to 20 seconds references Forever.

So I think...

30 years later, we are now ready to just talk about 3D and move on from forever, forever.

I feel like as a culture, we've rejected it, rightly so.

And we've leaned into the Duke that we know and love.

And I feel like he's going to come back.

But he's still in the clutches of Gearbox, I believe, which is unfortunate.

Yes, I think his last real appearance was a Bulletstorm DLC or a re-release of Bulletstorm with Duke Nukem in the main role, or something like that.

To be fair to them, it was kind of funny as a novelty that they just had him incredulously react to everyone, constantly calling him the name of the main character from Bulletstorm, whose name escapes me.

But it wasn't a Duke game.

I guess there was World Tour with the new episode, but we'll get to that.

Let's talk about the state of the first-person shooter in 96.

So we are essentially still living in the world of the 25D first-person shooter, something that's very hard to describe.

I'm hoping other people on this show can help me out here because it looks like 3D, but it ain't 3D.

It's full of these technical tricks to think that you are inside of a fully rendered 3D world, but you really are not.

It's all an optical illusion.

And most people were introduced to this concept with Wolfenstein 3D in 1993.

But technology was advancing so fast, we were ready to move on from this iteration by 96 because...

We have the Duke Nukem 3D shareware in January, the original release of the full game in April and then, I believe, Quake is in June.

And Quake is, here is your fully polygonal 3D FPS.

That's where it really arrives.

And I know there are other experiments with fully polygonal worlds before that.

But Quake is where we were all ready.

We were all on board and excited for this next iteration of the FPS.

Yeah, for sure.

The early 90s was indeed a very important time for this first-person shooter genre, and Wolfenstein was one of the key ones, but there were so many others.

I think what ended up happening is that at first, you saw a lot of companies develop Wolfenstein-like games, which actually relates to the build engine itself, as we'll get to.

But quickly after you got Doom in 1993, and this was really when the floodgates opened and we started getting what they always called Doom clones at the time.

And this led to some very interesting games that weren't...

That I would actually argue weren't just Doom clones.

Like we already mentioned, Dark Forces, of course, but there's games like Descent, for instance, which really stand out.

You know obviously, on top of that, you know there was a lot of clones out there, like the fortress of Dr Radiaki and some other not so great stuff.

But then you had origin systems doing the Ultima underworld.

They did the original system shock, which was pushing sort of first person shooting in its own unique direction, adding more like RPG elements into it.

You had Bethesda with the Terminator games.

Like they did the Terminator rampage and then like future shock and eventually Skynet.

And those games all actually had a lot of polygon graphics as well.

Um, and then, yeah, there was the Wolfenstein clones.

I mentioned like Blake stone, for instance, corridor seven from capstone, which is important.

There was heretic from Raven, you know, which is the doom engine.

So there was just all this stuff happening at the same time.

But in the background was this humming about like, all right, what is it software going to do next?

And everybody was like waiting for this quake thing.

Uh, but in the background uh, Of course, you had well, Apogee and 3D Realm, sort of like cooking on what would become Duke Nukem 3D.

And I feel like people at the time didn't really recognize what was coming until it was just around the corner and it made a gigantic splash.

Can we explain, though, what is a 2.5D FPS?

Because in terms of putting it out and spelling it out in words, it's really hard to do.

But once you see it and experience it, you understand like okay, in my own experience with the Build Engine, this is my one experience with level design.

When this game came out, I got obsessed with the Build Engine.

I printed out the FAQ, would read it in Study Hall and I got a sense of just like oh, this is how this is different than real 3D.

You're kind of like pulling sectors out of the ground to form these levels.

So...

Yes.

So, actually the very first, we kind of start with something called ray casting, which was that's what Wolfenstein 3D did.

And it's basically like a technique for creating a 3D perspective from a fully 3D map.

But the limitation in the way ray casting was working on that engine was that you could only have these.

It was like broken up into a grid of squares.

So the maps were completely limited by these 90 degree angles, right?

And all ceilings were the same, or all walls were the same height.

So you'd go around and Wolfenstein 3D itself didn't even have floors or ceilings rendered, but some games did later on.

But you had that limited height, no elevation changes, no weird curves or angles on the walls.

It was extremely limited.

Whereas Doom, this was where John Carmack came up with this idea of doing sector-based 3D.

Which allowed you to sort of arbitrarily define the height of walls within a space, to create this sort of like 3D structures, if you will.

And like a control sector kind of dictated the height and texture of the target sector in the game.

Which allowed for like platforms and different heights and ceilings to exist within the same XY area.

So it wasn't actually like an XYZ kind of full 3D space.

But due to the way that was set up, you could sort of tag these different lines to create these sort of different shapes.

And when you actually put the player camera inside of that space, it did look genuinely 3D, right?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

But that's why, in Doom though, when you're shooting like say, an imp that's up on a ledge above the player, you're just like shooting straight ahead.

It always hits the enemy, right?

There is no actual elevation in terms of the gameplay.

It's literally just a visual trick.

Except until Duke came along.

Yes, exactly.

Because that was the era of there being no room over room 3D.

You could have height variation, but there could be no upper floor or lower floor of a building.

Exactly.

If I remember right, the Duke 3D Engine does some really fancy shenanigans, effectively with portals.

Because you will find many multi-floor buildings in Duke 3D.

They aren't actually multi-floor.

They are in fact separate buildings, separated horizontally but with a portal in the gap between them that you can see between the two spaces.

I think my build engine experience ended when I had to try doing that and I realized man, this is way too hard.

I'm not going to be the next level lord, I don't think.

It feels like kind of a flex.

The first thing you do in Duke Nukem 3D is fall down an enormous shaft onto the streets, and then you're able to climb up onto the building walls through the window into the building.

It's immediately absolutely crazy.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Elevation really matters in this game.

And we mentioned the build engine.

I do want to go into a bit of that because that is the engine that fuels this game.

It fueled a handful of other games.

It's very impressive technology that could run on low-end PCs of the time, which is why it was so popular.

You might not have been able to run Quake, like John, I believe you said, but you could definitely run Duke Nukem 3D and other build engine games.

And yes, this was invented by a genius teenager named Ken Silverman, who essentially basically, he took a look at Doom, correct?

And said, okay, here are all the things.

Oh, sorry, go ahead.

And Wolfenstein, right?

Yeah, let me explain.

This is actually pretty interesting.

When you look back at what Ken was doing, he actually he has stated that he first saw I think it was his brother playing Wolfenstein 3D and was inspired to try to make his own engine, which he initially called Walken 3D spelled like Christopher Walken, I believe.

And this was designed to offer very much similar capabilities to what Wolf 3D's engine was doing.

And he ended up creating a game from this, which he eventually would name Ken's Labyrinth.

And it's a Wolfenstein 3D clone, but far more colorful and arguably kid-friendly.

Like, I'm not sure if that was the point, but it's a very different vibe versus Wolfenstein 3D.

Um, and his dad actually scored him a publishing deal with Epic mega games.

So now Epic, which. wasn't really in the 3d space had their first kind of shooter out there.

And it was Ken's labyrinth 2.0.

So like the fully overhauled complete version.

But as this got released Ken, basically he had said that he he saw a list of the types of features that the doom engine would support, because doom was in development at this time.

And Ken wanted to make an engine that could do all of these things, and So he started by picking a name related to construction which, in this case, turned out to be Build.

And he would release some demos.

So early on he actually released a demo for this new technology.

That ended up being very different from what he would actually use in games, because he talked to John Carmack about what they were doing with Doom.

And John kind of recommended it to him.

This like sector-based approach that he was working on for the Doom engine.

And so Ken completely rewrote everything and came up with a brand new sort of like approach to this.

And this is where the build engine really kind of came from.

And over time, he would build this out.

And, as you mentioned at the beginning, it was initially used by a pair of Capstone games which I do fondly remember, despite them being somewhat flawed.

There was Witch Haven and William Shatner's Tech War.

And Tech War itself is fascinating because it has FMV sequences with the chat in there, I believe.

Tech War was like wildly ahead of its time, kind of like in a Jurassic Park trespasser kind of way, in that nothing worked, but it was like almost an immersive sim way before we had that concept.

Like it was almost like comfortable.

Now to cruelty squad of all things.

You're, you're dude, you're so right like stew bob.

Have either you played tech war by any chance?

I just watched a very long retrospective on the tech war franchise that's just what i do with my free time and uh, a large part of that video yes yes, exactly.

Uh, a large part of that video was highlighting that game and it did seem incredible.

It's a shame that was wasted.

On the tech war ip.

Is it actually available anywhere now at all?

Has it been like source ported or anything?

I don't i there.

I think there's a preliminary source port somewhere maybe, but it might just be for witch haven.

I feel like i have dos, boxed techs war and i probably, without the manual or anything, just bounced off it.

I don't know well, maybe i was frightened away by the thing about tech wars too is that even i actually have a period appropriate pc.

Still today, Installing and making that game run on a PC of that era is actually difficult.

It's a very finicky game.

It's a source port that I have played a bit of, and honestly, it's not worth it.

It's not that good, but come on.

They tried to simulate a city with pedestrians.

It's got a working train system.

It's got all this stuff that feels way ahead of its time.

It barely works, but it was all thanks to the build engine.

But if you actually look closely you'll see it doesn't leverage many of the build's new features, such as slopes and other advanced features techniques.

Right, if it still feels very much like a doom engine game, even though it's not so.

That's kind of like where duke would stand apart and 3d realms actually hired ken silverman to work on this, but ken did not design build, from what i understand, specifically to make duke 3d.

He just designed this killer engine and the team at 3d realms was able to leverage that to create the game.

Yeah, and it sounds like they initially just wanted to make a feature clone of Doom.

Doom is popular.

Let's do our own Doom.

This is the one period in time in which your third game could be called 3D, and I love that.

I really miss that era.

We can never go back.

But they were able to do things that weren't possible with Id's engine.

They could do slopes jumping, blowing holes in walls, lots of interactivity and more on that aspect as we discuss the game.

But they gradually realized just how much this engine could do and they started to go hog wild during the final stages of development.

So all of the neat little gimmicks in Duke, the inessential interactions, those are coming towards the end of development.

I believe the interactive pool table was something added in the last few weeks because, thanks to the build engine the very easy-to-use build engine they could discuss an idea over lunch, then go back to their desk, implement it in the game very, very easily.

It just...

Because you're not working with assets you need to render and things like that.

It's all just very, very simple technology.

One of the things I didn't realize until watching that little retrospective video today.

They commented on how, while building this game, the staff would clock out at five and then just go and play Doom.

Yes.

And someone recognized like, wait, that's really bad, right?

Like we're making this game, but nobody actually wants to play it.

They just want to play Doom.

And so they went to Scott Miller and Scott went to George and they kind of like reworked the whole thing based on this.

Like we need to make something different.

And they did.

Yeah, there was some original team leader.

I'm not sure who that was, but this is a pretty small team but I guess average for the time between eight to ten people.

And I assume based on that video that just went live today.

I had not heard this before, but I guess just Bloom and Level Lord were the two level designers for the initial three episodes.

And I assume the fourth one for the Atomic Edition.

It's kind of funny.

You mentioned Level Lord, because earlier we talked about Heavy Metal and then he would go on, I believe, to work on a Heavy Metal game with FAC2.

He was one of the, I guess, eight FPS celebrities of the late 90s, early aughts.

I just remember his name in conjunction with him being made fun of for being called Level Lord unfortunately,

But hey, he is still Level Lording it up, as far as I know.

That's great.

So there's a lot going on here, and there are some key features that Doom Engine could not match.

We've talked about a few of them, like rooms above rooms and slopes, dynamic sectors which allow for fake destruction in events, swimming lots of interactive things.

We'll talk more about that when we talk about the game.

But yeah, this engine saw an impressive amount of use before Y2K and enabled designers to create arguably more ambitious stages than polygonal engines of the time could.

Because you don't have to.

Sprites can really do a lot of the grunt work instead of like polygons when you can't really render too many polygons on the screen.

And we saw a few other series launch on the back of Build, like Blood and Shadow Warrior.

And I believe that LucasArts Outlaws game is not Build Engine, but it is a 2.5D game.

So this version of the FPS was still popular up through the end of Y2K.

Yeah, exactly.

Another one that's interesting and we'll talk about these console versions later.

But there was the game Power Slave slash Exhumed, which did run on the build engine, only on PC.

The console version was a completely different and arguably much, much better game.

But then, off the strength of that, that company got the rights to make a Sega Saturn port of Duke Nukem 3D.

So it's kind of interesting how all of this stuff connects.

And I'm sorry, everybody.

I forgot to mention redneck rampage.

I know we have some fans out there.

Yes.

I think it even got an expansion at some point.

Oh, it got two expansions.

Two expansions.

Yeah, Suck and Grits on Route 66 and Redneck Rampage Rise Again.

And obviously, obviously I quite like Redneck Rampage.

It's me.

You know what?

I'm looking at the Wikipedia now and there are several DLC packs or whatever, expansion packs.

So potentially Redneck Rampage episode coming.

Oh, hell yeah.

Don't forget Redneck Deer Hunting and Redneck Racing.

Oh, man, there were some crossovers.

Okay, yeah.

Well, we're going to put this in the future episodes pile, perhaps.

I need more experience with Redneck Rampage.

I've only played the demo, and I didn't enjoy what I played.

But yes, we talked about the build engine.

What else do we have to talk about?

Oh, yeah, the personality of Duke himself.

Oh, yeah.

He did not have a voice until producer George Broussard found some inspiration while playing the LucasArts Adventure game Full Throttle.

That game stars a rough biker named Ben with a gruff voice.

He has a lot of witty one-liners.

This game comes out like a year before Duke Nukem 3D, by the way.

This is how late this is added in the development of the game.

So they want this kind of personality for their main character.

They find a radio DJ named John St.

John.

He auditions with some full throttle lines.

He becomes the voice of Duke Nukem.

And it's been said that there's probably about 100 lines in the game, which is phenomenal for a 1996 game.

We were not really doing this in the FPS space.

There were talkies when it came to adventure games and such.

But FPS main characters did not ever talk this much.

Maybe in Dark Forces there was like one quip per level, correct?

Yeah, it was just like when you completed mission objectives, he would make a comment.

That's about it.

Voice acting was so rare back then that games sold separate upgrade packs on an extra 10, 15 floppy disks just to add voice acting.

Yeah, the voice of Duke, because he exists in this world.

That is just so pastiche.

From the beginning, the character himself is so overtly ludicrous that it's and you know, your mileage may vary on this, but there are elements of the game and of the character that are yes, they're quite sexist, they're quite retrograde, but also it's so silly that it seems crazy to get offended by something so over the top, so ludicrous, so so a parody of what it is.

And then what forever did is they four, four?

They put to the forefront that regrettable stuff and ruined him, and i'm still mad about it and i'll probably die mad about it.

Well Yeah, when you're a kid and you're playing Duke Nukem, you're kind of taking it seriously.

But then when you come back to it a little later, you're thinking well, I'm actually just playing a McBain movie and it's very silly.

And a lot of the lines, a lot of classic games are built on plagiarism.

So a lot of the lines are just stolen from famous movies.

And it's really unfortunate that I played Duke Nukem 3D a lot more than I've seen Army of Darkness, because the few times I've watched Army of Darkness, whenever Bruce Campbell says groovy or any of the other lines that are in this game, I just think of Duke Nukem saying them.

But actually, it made me seek out Army of Darkness and they lived.

So, hey, the plagiarism led to new experiences.

It's a shame that Duke Nukem Forever didn't try to plagiarize Bubba Hotep, though.

There's a whole thing missing.

I haven't seen that, but I imagine there's a lot of great quips you could just jam into Duke.

It's a lot of fun, for sure, yeah.

I mean, I feel like Army of Darkness could support a boomer shooter, and someone should make that.

That would be amazing.

I would be way into that, yeah.

As far as I know, there has not been a good Evil Dead game.

I did not play that asymmetrical shooter they made, or asymmetrical online game.

I actually enjoyed that, but it died so quickly that it was like well, Evil Dead dead, you know?

Yeah, it was.

It was an okay game and that's all i can say about it.

It seems so frustrating that they can't make a good evil dead game like it's right there.

Yeah, you don't need to do anything.

I thought about doing an evil dead episode at some point about the games and then i realized i don't want to have to play these or look at them.

They're all bad.

You don't want to play evil dead regeneration, but Maybe another 15 years of doing Retronauts, I'll get around to doing that, let's say.

I'll be withered enough to want to do it.

I mean, I'll take that bullet if you like, but I don't mind.

I think I'll be a Deadeye by the time I do the Evil Dead episode.

But going back to Duke Nukem, it took about eight people, with more added towards the end, roughly two years and only 300000 to make this game.

And on January 29th 96, 30 years ago today, as of this recording, the shareware release of Duke Nukem 3D launched.

This version only contains the first episode, a sizable five levels.

You could chew on this for a very long time and a lot of people did.

And they had to because the full release of the game did not come until late April, early May, depending on which release you received.

So yeah, this was this kind of shareware model still persisting and the for the time.

If you were a kid, these are huge levels.

They are full of secrets and I'm sure a lot of people only played this first episode.

I'm most familiar with this one because I think it's the one my friend had before I eventually got the full version.

Yeah, that first level of Hollywood Holocaust has got to be the best first level ever of anything in terms of giving you so much to play with, putting you in this astonishing playground full of new experiences.

I mean, it's got everything.

It's got combat.

You can find all the weapons on the first episode if you know where to look.

It's got the hovering enemies.

You've got the cinema you can go to.

You can look at boobies, which is, you know, wonderful.

Um, the toilets.

There's a toilet you can go in and there's an enemy sitting on the toilet, which is hilarious.

Obviously there's a friggin jetpack that you can find and just fly around at your heart's content, but it's just a amazing first level with so many routes through it, so many secrets you can find and so much personality.

Like right out the gate, you're like i need to buy this And I think at the time, my experience was at the time that I've been playing these 25D shooters for maybe two or three years.

And you kind of understood, even if you didn't have the language, what they were capable of.

But when you start this first level, like we were saying, you fall off of a building.

You can blow up the screen of the movie theater, find secrets behind it.

You can go into heating ducts.

You can turn on and off lights.

We'll talk more about these little interactions.

But up front, they're letting you know, like, we figured this out.

The most you could possibly do in this format.

We're going to try to show it to you all up front in this semi-realistic setting.

It's sort of like the GTA appeal.

And I think that's absolutely key, because secrets and stuff like that were very common in these shooters.

But Duke actually made it logical, right? right?

Like in doom, everything's very abstract.

You just look at stuff like, Oh, a wall open, right?

But here it's more about opening doors, going into this window, blowing up some object you recognize, and that really makes a big difference in terms of creating a place to explore.

I think that the initial you drop down, you see your battleship or whatever.

It is just exploding in the distance as it flies over.

I'm not going to do a Duke impression, but Duke, saying those alien bastards are going to pay for shooting up my ride, loads his pistol and you're like, just let's fucking go.

Sorry, don't know if we're cussing on this one.

We can.

I mean, it's a Duke Lincoln podcast.

We have to.

That is fair.

Yeah, but that additional like detail to the environments kind of also informs like, how you interact with the world because, like

So often the levels aren't just like find the key card for red door use on the other half of the level.

You will like go to a security desk and there will be a switch that you need to crouch down to hit that.

And things are in intuitive, natural places like they would be in real life.

Like medical supplies are in cabinets on the wall.

Yeah, they managed to balance that with the game element so well.

It's never boring.

You're never in a boring environment, even though it is real.

It's such an impressive illusion.

Yeah, and some of the movie references actually lent to the level design.

In, I believe, the second level of the first episode.

You have to find the exit by going behind a pinup poster in a jail cell, like in Shawshank Redemption.

Right, right, yeah.

Oh yeah, there were so many references, especially in The Secrets.

You'd find in one of the space, the moon-based levels.

You'd find a dead Luke Skywalker in a side tunnel somewhere.

Isn't one of the space levels literally the Enterprise if you look at the map as well?

Yes, yes.

And there's the secret within where you find Picard's really ready room which has porn on every screen going.

And sort of the attitude in finding the Space Marine from Doom.

That's one Doom Space Marine.

I think Lara Croft's in there as well, maybe in the PlayStation version.

There's mockery of Quake.

He's not afraid of no Quake is what he says when there's an earthquake.

We'll go over more of the game details.

I want to go over the releases right now, and then we can move on to the meat of the game.

Yeah, absolutely.

And like a great release for this game.

I feel like they probably wanted to hit a Christmas window with the initial release, but they really couldn't.

So this is them making up for it in the next year.

Actually.

Yeah.

And then I think I do think it's worth mentioning some of the console versions here, because you got, the thing to keep in mind is that console players were actually finally envious of what the PC had to offer, right.

Like stuff like doom was already very hot, but Duke Nukem 3d was the new hotness.

And it makes sense to try to bring that to console players.

And the, This was during the time when the PlayStation, Saturn, and N64 were on the market.

And they were technically moderately capable of this.

And the PlayStation port is actually an attempt to bring proper Duke Nukem 3D to the system.

And it seems to use directly the build engine as it is.

But because it's almost running in software mode, so you don't get any texture warping that you typically get on PlayStations. because of that but the frame rate is really really low it does not run well at all yeah actually i played a lot of the n64 version so i remember that being a fun version uh stewart the n64 version and john you'll definitely know if i'm wrong here but that was actually 3d wasn't it you could shoot grenades through like windows and things you had a new grenade launcher so yeah and some enemies were 3d and 64 actually because of how n64 worked that was a proper like 3d accelerated if you will version of the engine like genuinely enhanced to support proper 3d features so you got like texture filtering there real 3d polygon graphics things like that that no other version had so that was completely different versus playstation where it was really the build engine it actually even had performance options which was unusual at the time you could turn vsync on and off on playstation for some extra frames but the It's actually the Saturn version that I think is the most interesting from this era because this is the one that Lobotomy did, right?

The creators of Power Slave.

And they use their slave driver engine instead of the build engine, because build on the Saturn not so good.

And slave driver allowed them to create a.

It's a full 3D engine, unlike build, but they took all the sprites and other things and like basically recreated the whole game from scratch using their own engines.

And so it ends up having a very weird feel to it.

Like, the scale is different.

Things kind of look and behave a little different.

But, like, fundamentally, like, the core of the game is there.

And it winds up being, like, this really weird, like, actual 3D take on Duke Nukem 3D from that era.

Complete with support for the analog controller on Saturn.

So if you wanted to use 3D analog looking and like face buttons for moving around, you could do that.

I'm going to mention it because I won't get another opportunity, but also the main reason why Jr.

Come on Saturn is so good is because Death Tank Zwei.

That's why.

I mean, that is great.

Death Tank and Death Tank Zwei, the little mini game in there.

Yeah.

And heck.

I think my boss, Richard Ledbetter, is actually mentioned as a special thanks for both that game and the port of Quake that they would do.

Awesome.

Because they gave it so much coverage in the Sega Saturn magazine.

Well, thank you for that info.

I only have experience with the N64 version outside of the PC version.

I did want to mention also some of the expansions.

This is a very popular time for the PC FPS expansion.

So we have a few that I assume got the approval of 3D Realms.

We're not developed by 3D Realms.

We have Duke It Out in DC.

Duke Caribbean, Life's a Beach and Duke Nuclear Winter, which is the Christmas-themed Duke Nukem expansion.

These are all part of the delisted Megaton edition.

We'll talk more about that in a second.

But I have not played any of these because honestly, there's more than enough official Duke levels for me.

I eventually want to get around to these sanctioned ones.

But this was at the time when companies would just sell you a thousand Duke levels on a CD-ROM and the unofficial Duke Nukem expansion pack or whatever.

So these were the official ones.

Those are wild, actually.

I actually did play Duke it out in D.C. from what I remember back in the day.

But yeah, there was this whole market for selling CD-ROMs packed with levels from around the internet.

I mean, I got into that first with the Doom packs and then It was hard not to get into that because internet access was so sparse at the time.

It was difficult to get on the internet.

At least it was for me.

Yeah, it was.

When I got the Duke Nukem 3D Atomic Edition for Christmas of that year, I also got just an unlicensed disc that they bought at the store with a thousand levels on it.

That whole vacation was me just trying every level for five minutes.

Yeah.

Yeah, there are so many versions of Duke out there and, like Megaton has been delisted, World Tour is like the new kind of official sanctioned version.

I do want to mention that you can buy it on the Zoom platform, which is a slightly obscure digital delivery thing.

And it does come with all of those expansions plus Duke Zone.

I think it's the only place you can get it and it's like ready to go with the eDuke engine all built in.

So that's probably the best version to buy if anyone's interested.

Yeah, seconding that.

It's a shame that the Megaton Edition was relisted, because the 20th Anniversary Edition gets a lot of crap because of that.

All of the impressions I got of that edition came out around the time it launched.

So everyone is very mad about the other edition being relisted.

But honestly, I played the 20th Anniversary Edition and I really liked it.

I think it runs a little better than the Megaton Edition.

And this may sound like sacrilege, but I really love the correct the perspective correction in the game.

You push a button and it makes the perspective a little more natural.

Again, that's not how the game was originally played.

But when I go back to the original perspective, I get a little pukey playing this game on my 4K TV.

So I feel like that really goes a long way to help some people get over the motion sickness they might feel when playing this kind of 25D shooter.

I mean, John will know better again, but I understand the World Tour Edition.

I don't think it launched in a good state, and I don't know whether or not it's actually been fixed.

I think you have to kind of be a Duke fan, but there was a lot of people mad about the Megaton Edition being replaced by it.

And for one thing, it's less content.

But, John, you must know more about this than I do.

Yeah, the thing with that version though, is that it just had a lot of inherent technical issues that made it kind of not great.

It's actually been a while since i've explored it, because i specifically don't play that version of the newer versions actually, the one i remember really playing, i think it was the megaton edition when it was on ps vita, which is a novelty having duke nukem 3d running that well on a handheld system.

I forgot all about that.

I miss my vita.

Why did i sell it?

I know the vita is so good.

It's certainly better than And then we didn't mention it yet.

The game con version of 3d was uh, it basically played like the fantasy star one dungeons, but with like a gun in front.

It was just like flip screen between random images it's.

It's horrible.

It looks very, very rough based on the footage.

And i forgot to mention that the 20th anniversary edition contains a new episode with levels designed by the original designers.

I have not played that content.

I i feel like opinions are mixed on that, but it is still nice to see.

Like what, what would they do 10 years ago?

Uh, with all of the uh, you know, level design hindsight they have.

You know, I've always wanted specifically Night Dive to tackle this.

And I'm sure there's licensing reasons why they can't.

But when they've re-released stuff like Quake, Quake 2 Doom, they always create these amazing level packs.

Like for Quake, they worked with Machine Games to create like brand new episodes, which is like what could you do with this engine and this technology if you pushed it to the max and applied like modern day thinking to it?

And the answer was always like something really, really special.

I just want Night Dive to release every FPS.

I just want everyone else to give up and just go, here you go.

There's nothing I don't think would be different from their touch.

But yeah, if you want to play Duke 3D now, your best bet.

I would recommend as well going with the Megaton Edition plus the E-Duke 32 engine, which is, like the Duke, equivalent to Z-Doom or whatever.

It is magnificent.

Actually, there's another source port.

Raze, is it?

Raze.

Yeah, Raze.

By the guy who basically got driven off the GZDoom team because he tried to vibe code it.

Oh, boy.

All I can say though, is that I've actually found that the Raze stuff runs a lot better than eduke.

Eduke has like weird frame pacing issues and other problems that i never quite was able to solve, whereas that just works better.

You don't want to run um eduke using the, the polymer engine, which is their like um higher tech.

Oh sure sure sure yeah, like that renderer just does never worked quite right.

No no, no.

But even without it, it's still like there's always been issues with it.

I found like I was never very happy with the performance on any of my systems, but like technically, the readout is like hey, it's running smooth, but it doesn't present that way.

There's something weird with it.

Yeah, I mean, I've got to be real.

I only used Raze to play Redneck Rampage.

It was the easiest way to get it running.

I guess the 20th Anniversary Edition could be more ideal, but I also just got it in a sale for like 4 and it does run really well.

And like I said, that perspective correction really...

Of course.

Yeah.

Sorry, Duke.

And, to be fair, they did give you new levels, but they also removed the DLC levels that Megaton Edition did include, like the three expansions.

Didn't they re-record all the dialogue as well with John St.

John?

Or did I imagine that?

They did, but you can also click a button in the options to have the old crunchy voice clips back.

Oh, okay.

That's good.

Thankfully, I immediately fixed that when I first heard the initial...

20 years later recording, he's like no, i cannot do this.

Everything has to be having like a crunchy, deep fried sound effect for this to be duke nukem 3d.

I hate to mention him, but i sort of see the world tour edition as a kind of sonic origin situation where it's like, if you can't, if you gotta play duke 3d and that's the only one, then i think it's okay.

You're playing duke, you're having a basically good experience, but if you're you, if you want to go deeper, there are ways.

Yeah, there are ways to improve it, definitely.

Yeah also, the new levels in the world tour edition are really quite good.

Yeah, really impressive scale.

The only downside of them is the slightly obnoxious new flamethrower enemy.

Oh yeah yeah, the like the bug people who just like set you on fire and nobody likes damage over time.

Yeah, i hear they're pretty easy to kill, but they are annoying when they can, when they get you on fire.

Thank you.

Let's talk about the game now.

We've been tip-toeing around a lot of the different things that make this game sing, and I really want to drill down on interactivity, because there's a huge amount of meaningful and also meaningless interactions that are still very impressive today.

Even though I played this game a bunch, going back to it i'm like wow, i forgot this happened or i forgot you could do this, or i forgot this changes the environment in this way.

Uh, it's just so fun to screw around in the levels of duke nukem 3d and there's there's too many interactions to list here and we have limited time.

Of course, we can at least talk about some of the more clever and notable ones, and i think uh, the biggest impressive thing about this game is, To put it bluntly or to put it broadly, changing geometry in levels.

This is not actual geometry as far as we know, but it evokes that kind of feeling.

So walls can break down and reveal hidden passages.

Buildings will crumble.

Earthquakes tear apart the land.

Water levels rise and lower.

And this was not possible until they could dynamically alter these sectors, which is not going on in Doom.

Exactly.

That is a key feature and you actually see it in stuff like Witch Haven beforehand, but Duke really takes it to the next level and it does make the levels feel a lot more dynamic.

And I think you could.

You can absolutely do this stuff in the quake engine, but due to the extra demands of that technology at the time, it was also rather challenging there.

Whereas like dynamically altering the sectors was a pretty fast operation.

So they were able to use it like everywhere.

And it really, really shows.

Like even things like just like the very first level.

You walk down that hallway into the lobby of the theater and it's just like a huge quake hits right.

And like it just blows up chunks of the wall and you just see the world change around you in real time, which was really, really fresh.

And the dynamic sectors.

Of course, they used for like stuff as humble as swinging doors, but it could also do like, as they could move sectors around and rotate them.

They could, like, do faked vehicles.

They could do trains.

They could do... Oh, yeah.

But also...

Those never quite worked right on the player, especially the swinging doors.

Everyone who has ever played a Build Engine game has a few nightmare stories of going to open a door and, like a cartoon character, the door just slams open and squashes you against the wall, killing you instantly.

Interestingly, they actually implemented swinging doors into Hexen.

Raven Software did that in the Doom engine, so that was at least possible, but most other things not really.

You mentioned Hexen and I want to just mention quickly, when it comes to interactivity as well as with the world, Duke does have an inventory, like in Hexen or Heretic, and it just adds more variety to the combat, to the way you can get around.

You can pop steroids or vitamin X if you're playing on a console.

That lets him jump further, run much further.

I mean...

On the first level alone, you can use those.

You can finish the stage in, like, 15 seconds if you know what you're doing.

But it also gives you the Hollow Duke which means I don't think that's been used before that I can recall which lets you drop a decoy to draw fire while you try and flank enemies.

There are just so many ways that you can use the world in conjunction with the items that you have.

That it creates a variety that's really just so fresh for this game when it came out.

And now, to be honest.

The thing that always sticks out though, for me here is that we talk about all this interactivity, and it's super important.

But it's also kind of front and back loaded in a way.

And that this game actually has at least half of it set in outer space.

Right?

Yeah.

You're not actually on Earth doing stuff all that long.

But even there they still managed to come up with a lot of interesting interactive elements that aren't just Earth-based things.

Yeah, perhaps unfairly, I do kind of skip those levels sometimes because they're not as immediately entertaining as you know, the real world levels.

Yeah, I think it's a reasonably common shareware thing.

Maybe I'm being unfair here.

The first episode is the best episode.

That's the one that gets you to buy the game.

I mean, I feel that way about the original Doom, which is a game I love passionately.

But I do feel episodes two and three aren't quite as interesting as episode one.

That's down to Sandy Peterson, who, let's be honest, he's new to the world.

We're saying it here, folks.

Oh, I want to say that I just played like five hours of this game to refresh my memory.

And I don't know if I'm being unfair here.

But it feels like modern game levels are much more static and concrete than what you're seeing with Duke Nukem 3D.

If you would have to program that into a game with full polygonal worlds in 4K, you need an entire team on that to make sure the building falls the right way.

What's the physics engine doing?

How is this going to resolve in the world?

But in the low-budget world of Duke Nukem 3D, the 1996 world, the imagination could be much bigger with these tools.

That's actually – so this is something I was just thinking about before.

It applies both to the design but also like the references themselves.

Like they're not going to lawyers to say, hey, can we do this?

They're not employing like giant teams to like implement features.

It really feels like they're just like, you know, it would be cool if we did this.

And they're like, yeah, let's do that.

And then an afternoon later they've done it right.

I mean yeah, it gives it an edge and a sense of fun, and it's even in things like uh, like i mean, there are glitches, there are bugs obviously, but it's like you'll think you found an exploit, a skip, and then you'll find a message on the wall that says you're not supposed to be here.

They knew what you were going to do.

The designers put their all into this, And we talked about elevation earlier.

This is a huge element of this game.

There's a jetpack in the game.

There are rooms above rooms in this game.

There's ramps in this game.

I can go on and on.

There's platforming challenges.

And I'm trying to remember, to bring myself back to 1996, did I play with mouse look?

I probably did, but I don't think I played Doom using the mouse at all.

And I can't remember.

But this is essential in Duke Nukem 3D, right?

I mean you could, I guess, use page up and page down to look up and down, but you're going to get your ass kicked.

Yeah, it's not an easy game, but of course in the console versions you didn't really have that option, so they had to be accommodating.

Um, i mean, i remember playing this game with just the keyboard and yeah, i just, i think i just played it on piece of cake or something because there was no way i was going to get through the harder.

Yeah, i mean, i originally played it with the cursor keys and using a and z or zed stewart to look up and down, and that was it like and it was pretty brutal as a result.

But like that It wasn't until for me personally, it wasn't until Quake 2 that I really learned mouse looking.

And that was only because I discovered that looking at the ground made the frame rate higher.

So I just used mouse to kind of look around down when I was running around.

I don't know when I started strafing in FPSs, but it was a real game changer when I wasn't just slowly pivoting and walking in a straight line.

Yeah, I didn't learn mouse look until the original Quake either.

And then going back to Duke with those new skills and...

Everything just made so much more sense.

Oh, yeah.

So the elevation stuff, though I think both the elevation and I think this ties into the slopes of the environment.

Essentially, they were able to create environments that were just so far beyond what was done in other Doom engine games or other similar engines at the time.

And they really use slopes.

Like there are so many areas where it's just got uneven sort of sectors, like up and down.

And it really lends this world like a different feel from things other games at the time and things like the swimming.

Like there's that one level where it's like the whole city is like flooded.

Right.

And you actually can swim deep down into different buildings or like fly up in the air with the jet pack.

And it just feels enormous to explore.

Yeah, but there is still a lot of trickery here because like yeah, you can do rooms above rooms but due to the way that actually works, you can't have like a room with a window on top of another room with a window in the same spot right, because they're technically not in the same space in the world.

It's like it's all a trick, as he kind of mentioned earlier.

So you could have.

You have to offset everything, so everything had to be designed so as not to break the rules but still give that semblance of being like a real place.

Yeah, you could have like a, a hole in the floor that led to another room that is technically someplace to the side below it.

But yeah, you could not have exactly arranged windows.

I feel like I mean, I would argue Sorry, this is slightly tangential, but still related to Duke 3D, thankfully.

It's kind of... A set piece in, say, Doom is a monster closet, right?

The lights turn off, a door opens, some imps are in there.

But in Duke, it's constant, varied set pieces and locations.

Like I remember being buffeted down the the sewer pipe, that you're surfing almost on sewage into a huge reservoir, and then all the aforementioned building collapses, the earthquake.

That first episode is like a.

It's like rocket night adventures or something, except you're it's kind of like a treasure game almost with all of these.

Oh yeah yeah, to some extent yeah, And yeah, we talked about some of the other interactive elements.

I want to drill down even further.

There's just so much you can do in this game that just could not be done at the time.

And some games aren't even doing this right now.

Like the fact that you can see yourself in mirrors.

I feel like we've lost that as a people.

Why can't I see my guy in a mirror?

Well, Duke Nukem was doing it.

It was a huge uh like and it was actually useful for seeing enemies.

It was not just a technical trick, like you walk into a room you'd see a mirror, but then there'd be an enemy visible in the mirror.

You turn around, kill the enemy, like they were using the technical tricks to help build the levels as well.

And other things like surveillance cameras were a huge element of this game, in that there are surveillance screens, there are cameras posted.

It will show you elements of the level and this is often essential for you to know like okay, this door is open now, or this, what's waiting?

This is what's waiting for me around this one corner.

Oh john, I actually want to mention one thing about the mirrors, cause it's such, it's such a freaky thing.

So the mirrors are an example of using this sort of portal concept to create an effect.

The mirror is actually just a special wall texture that's flagged as reflective, and they essentially built a duplicate room behind it.

And then they mirror all the same sprites and enemies on both sides of it, but it's technically a separate space.

So like you could like no, clip into the mirror and essentially end up in like the mirror world, which is like an alternate part of the level.

That's like my house dot what or something.

It's super weird when you actually start thinking about it like it makes sense, because duplicating geometry to make reflections is something that would become pretty common.

But here it really is just like they just remade the same room and then put a wall there to make it look like a reflection.

But it worked.

I think it's worth mentioning to some extent how the weapons, also the imaginative nature of the weapons, changes up your tactics.

Things like throwing pipe bombs around corners that you can then manually detonate.

Laser tripwires, things like that.

I don't think they'd be The shrinking ray where you then step on an enemy which you then later have to use on yourself to become very tiny.

It's all just really imaginative and great fun.

Yes.

Yeah, a lot of the set pieces involve well, a few of them involve getting shrunken down and then having to find your way through cramped corridors before you then expand, because then you will just die instantly if you're in like a little crawl space while you're expanding from tiny Duke to huge Duke.

And crucially Bob, you can destroy a toilet and then drink the water from the toilet to gain health.

This is important.

I feel like that is a very fun joke in this game where yes, we will kind of give you infinite health, but you have to drink out of a toilet.

For minutes on end, just pounding the E key.

Stuart, sorry.

Huge deal when you're a kid.

Toilets, brilliant.

Oh, boy.

We mentioned this earlier, but a huge amount of the appeal, especially in this first episode, is the fact that a lot of this game takes place in a facsimile of the real world.

It's very abstracted.

It's very simple.

We're not seeing what we're seeing in GTA V, of course, but we were not seeing these kind of settings in games, not just because they were porno stores and strip clubs, but because games were about bringing us to fantasy realms and sci-fi and other things.

Here, it's like, okay...

Here is our little diorama of a street in L.A.

Have fun inside of it.

And I feel like I mentioned Grand Theft Auto earlier.

That same effect would be happening years later in Grand Theft Auto 3.

It's like, OK, here's my violent fantasy in this kind of realistic version of a city.

Let's have fun in it.

Let's screw around in it.

And the same appeal could be found all the way back in 1996.

Hey, I mean.

William Shatner's tech war.

Tried to do the city as well.

That's true, yes.

But there's a reason nobody talks about it.

We weren't quite there yet.

But yeah, this game has a lot of semi-realistic settings.

We have like a sushi restaurant, a bank, a prison, a video store, a movie set, and more.

And there's an entire episode that takes place in space, in like spaceships.

It's similar to what you would see in a Doom game, but because of the tools they're playing with, it's a lot more interesting.

There's like teleporters, there's varying geometry, there's ships flying around you.

I do kind of ignore that second episode, but I don't want to deny that it's also very good.

I say compare and contrast Doom 2's level downtown with any level from the first episode of Duke 3D really.

The leap in how they represent a city is absolutely enormous.

And that's not me throwing shade at Doom 2, obviously, but, you know, downtown.

Yeah, actually, so that's interesting, Stu.

I joked about Sandy Peterson earlier, but I do think when you look at his Doom levels, he very much was trying to do real-world locales but it didn't work.

He's like Oh, here's the warehouse, you know, or here's the city or the factory, but they did not resemble any of those places and just ended up being kind of boring.

And the reason Romero's levels work so well is that they were very much like puzzle boxes, that kind of unfurled before the player.

The building is capable.

I mean the both the designer's talent and the build engine allowed 3D Realms to actually make places that did moderately resemble the locations they set out to build.

Yeah, and so much of it was due to little prefab detail objects like every office chair, every light switch.

Those were just stock objects that also had destructible states.

All of the trees, all of the lights.

They could just sprinkle the entire map full of all of these little bits of interactivity or breakability at almost no cost to the level designer.

And one thing I wanted to mention is something I really noticed upon playing through the game again this time.

The continuity in the levels is impressive.

It's not quite Half-Life in which the world just feels contiguous, even though there are loading screens separating different levels.

You do feel like you're making your way through one...

Well-developed space that is just a hole that exists somewhere.

Here it's not quite that, but you will see how the end of one level logically leads to another, often in very slight narrative ways.

Like, at the end of one level, Duke Nukem is ambushed by pig cops.

You don't fight them.

The level ends.

The next level begins.

You are in the electric chair.

You have to get out of it very quickly.

So not every level is like that, but I feel like they had this in mind and that's a little bit ahead of its time for an FPS.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 did it.

Oh, true.

Yeah yeah, sonic's always for sonic's the pioneer, sonic 3d maybe, perhaps exactly exactly.

Yeah no, sonic 3, no half-life yeah, i do want to mention.

Because you mentioned the pig cops for the first time.

Can i just say how goddamn satisfying it is killing pig cops.

Yes this this uh, this is a.

Weirdly, it's an a-cab game.

I would say it is.

Yeah, it's a um, it's an abo.

A board game.

Always bet on duke.

But they're also very mad at OJ.

Simpson in this game.

So they're having it both ways.

Oh, yes.

Yes, there are going to be O.J.

Simpson references in this 1996 video game.

You will see the Bronco.

I think the first level has that guilty written really large on one of the walls.

You can drop down a sign or something like that.

Yeah, now hold on, Bob.

This isn't Talking Simpsons, okay?

Well, the kids have to learn about O.J. sooner or later.

Yes, they do.

Do they get any Clinton jokes in there?

That's what I can't remember.

I want to say probably Duke It Out in D.C. has some.

I don't know if that came around the time of Lewinsky or not.

It might have been pre-Lewinsky, but there's got to be a ton of Clinton jokes.

There's got to be some jokes.

Is Duke Nukem political?

Yes.

Yes, very much so.

And one thing I noticed.

I do want to move on to have Dominic talk a lot about the modding scene, which is incredible.

But I did notice in this game if I'm playing it again, I would not call this a cover-based shooter, but I was using cover a lot more than I would in Doom or a similar older game, just because there is so much stuff in these levels.

You're not just walking down big hallways or in big rooms.

I found myself ducking in and out of rooms or behind pillars and using my newfound strafing abilities to really make this game a lot easier than it used to be.

It's just something you can do in the world.

It's not something they're enforcing on you or teaching you how to do.

It's a natural element of them just being able to build more creative worlds around you.

Cool.

Yeah, Duke Nukem 3D effectively defined an entire style of gameplay that is, I think, inherently PC.

It's why the console ports never quite felt right, because Duke Nukem's combat is incredibly fast and twitchy.

You want to be like throwing yourself into a room hitting the enemies with the biggest explosive weapons you've got immediately, because they will be able to kill you in like three seconds flat.

You want to get out of the way of any danger.

You want to be scrambling around like a lunatic 24-7.

That's harder to do on gamepad, yeah for sure, i mean.

So yeah it's, it's like um, i feel like we should mention the enemies besides the pig cops though, because even the first enemies you fight, they're capable of like doing the nothing personnel teleports behind you kind of thing, right like there are no enemies that aren't very dangerous.

If you ignore them and the pig cops with their shotguns, they will destroy you in in, like when there's more than one of them.

Actually, that kind of brings up one thing, and I'm curious about what you think about this, Dominic.

And I've always had a little bit of a complaint here.

As much as I love it, this game is super reliant on hitscan enemies.

Oh, yes.

Where they just like, no matter where you are or how fast you're going, they can just hit you right.

Where Doom mixed up hitscan with more, like, projectile-based foes.

Like, you think the imp's fireball that actually has, like, a travel arc, and you can dodge it.

And there's basically none of that here.

Oh yeah, that's also a key to, I think, all the Build Engine games, in that they all have a lot of hitscan enemies.

But you also have things like the pipe bombs that you can bounce around corners.

You have the holoduke.

You have various weapons with big splash damage.

You have stuff that can stunlock.

It gives you a lot of options, and you absolutely have to use everything that it gives you or you will die.

I think they knew that sometimes it's going to be unfair and you're just going to take damage, which is why I think every Build Engine game has a portable medikit item.

You can hold an entire extra bonus health bar for when the game is too cruel to you and you just say okay yeah, I'm just going to undo that damage now.

And you can also type in DK Cornholio to enter God mode.

I love that.

That just baked into the game.

Cornholio is a cheat.

Amazing.

Teach the kids about OJ and Cornholio.

In the early versions of the game, you could also hold, I think, the tilde key with the Mighty Butte equipped and do this kind of double-footed Cossack dance through the level, which was enormous fun.

And the fact you have an instant melee button is kind of like that.

That feels quite fresh as well.

You don't have to switch to the fist and then laboriously hit things.

It's just, bam, bust out a kick while you're shooting enemies.

And we also learned that that boot and jean belongs to Level Lord, Richard Gray himself.

And he still has it apparently.

And before we move on to the modding scene, I did want to talk about the multiplayer.

Of course, there were Duke matches.

Unfortunately I have very little experience with the Duke match, although I know one of the items you pick up in the core game, the hollow Duke.

That is really only useful in the Duke match, because most enemies will just ignore that.

So there are elements in the multiplayer game that are found in the actual game.

But do any of us have experience with this element?

Setting up multiplayer games is much harder in 96 than it is today.

Yeah, Duke 3D was one of the first ever games that I played, like online deathmatch, like through like early phone-based dial-in multiplayer services.

And it was laggy as hell.

It was unresponsive.

And weirdly enough, the Holoduke I found worked almost never online but it actually does work on almost every enemy in single player.

Oh, it works now.

Okay.

But the thing with Duke Match Online was it was a rush to the rocket launcher because that weapon, even if you had full health, full armor, a direct hit was instant death.

Like the combat in Duke and all Build Engine games is extremely swingy.

You can go from full health to dead in the blink of an eye.

And especially with the explosive weapons, everything is like near instantly lethal.

Yeah.

So I, so I did play some of this as well online on a 14 four modem and then later 56 K on a newer machine.

And I think that's part, that's part of the reason why I think this never took off in a big way.

In addition, quake of course comes along and they released quake world for that.

And I do think quake was just better suited for online play.

But yeah, Duke Nukem, the understated, the awesome multiplayer mode that it does have is co-op.

And that is a blast.

Oh, sorry, John.

I couldn't figure this out.

Was co-op always part of the game or was it eventually added to the game?

I believe it was always there because I remember playing this back in the 90s.

Okay, thank you.

Uh, if i recall i'm pretty sure both this and quake and doom in fact that was one of my favorite things to do was to play duke in co-op, but it was just like the single player levels but you just run around with another dude basically yeah, i gotta say i did not play duke much, but i did play duke much in duke and time to kill, which is really not the same thing.

That's for another day, time to kill, that was part of the tomb raider likes.

I want to say oh yeah yeah Yeah, I would love to do an episode about all of the esoteric Duke games that came after this, but I'll leave it to you to do the follow-up if it's your whim.

Again, I would have to play some of those and I kind of don't want to.

So maybe I'll leave that to you Stuart, but we'll figure it out.

Okay.

They are surprisingly good.

Yes, they are.

And I think the PlayStation exclusive one.

Land of the Babes.

Yes.

I think Zero Hour on the 64 is very good and that's got a decompilation recently so you can play it well on a PC.

I'm very fond of the Duke Nukem ephemera, but that's not for now.

There's a lot more of those than I realized when I went back to the research for this.

Oh, I forgot there were so many spinoffs.

But Going back to Duke Nukem 3D, is there anything else you want to mention about this game before we move on?

I'm going to let Dominic then host the podcast and talk about the modding scene, because there's just so much going on there and I really want to dig into it as much as we can in our remaining time.

One thing I didn't mention earlier about the tech that was kind of cool but also demanding was that this was a game that supported high resolution modes on the PC.

So if you wanted to play it in like 640x480 or even 800x600, you could do that, which is something that the Doom engine did not offer at all.

And Quake initially didn't go this high either.

But naturally, you needed a pretty fast machine at the time, like a decent Pentium system to run it.

But it was still cool.

It was great to have that on.

So let's move on to the modding scene.

And Dominic, I know you know a lot about this world.

I am intimidated, just like dipping my toe into the world of Duke Nukem modding, because it's been going on for oh, let's say, three decades.

But just the sheer amount of creations people have been able to make with the build engine and other Duke variants.

Very, very surprising.

And I know we don't have a ton of time left, but can you just give us a general overview of just how zany and inspired this world is?

Oh, yeah.

So Duke Free Modding has kind of exploded over the past decade thanks to, i know john may have had issues with it, but the everything runs on the eduke 32 engine.

Now it is like the assumed baseline and like some modders have just used it to make duke but more with um.

There's a big mod called blast radius and which is like 15 maps but each of them is like over an hour long.

They're gigantic non-linear urban sprawls with all of the interactivity and secrets that you'd expect from Duke Nukem, but with just absolutely no limits whatsoever.

You will be crawling through one building for half an hour solid and emerge into another four massive streets, each with several more buildings to explore.

And that's the baseline.

And then you've got...

One of the biggest ones.

That also requires you to own the game, because we're going to get into slightly legally questionable territory later.

Alien Armageddon, which is the biggest, almost normal mod for the game, which is effectively Duke Nukem 4.

It's a continuation of the story, fully voiced with Bombshell the character who is meant to be Duke Nukem's partner in the original version of Duke Nukem Forever as a tag team character, and you can switch perspective between the two and sometimes have to solve puzzles by having one character in one room pressing a switch.

Then you tag over to the other character to do stuff.

And that's episode one of Alien Armageddon.

Then episode two is you get drafted into an intergalactic fighting tournament and it's like almost Unreal Tournament-style scenarios where you are fighting alongside bots on both sides, with story bits in between.

And then there's episode three, where you play as Blade with the serial numbers filed off Wesley Snipes.

The character is called Wes Wolf.

Yeah. as he is fighting alien vampires around New York.

Then the fourth episode adds another two playable characters.

So you pick each mission, you pick two of the characters to pick from, each of them with their own full arsenal of weapons and some special abilities.

And there's even some light RPG elements as you spend money to buy permanent character upgrades.

Oh, God.

And that's kind of wild, really.

Yeah.

And that's still not even a fraction of what the fans have done.

Also, Alien Armageddon has an amazing roguelite mode where it...

It draws on all of the levels from Alien Armageddon, plus the original episodes plus, I think, a pack of like 200 of the community's best.

And when you pick this mode it generates a like seven level episode of like, increasing scale and complexity on the levels, randomizes all of the enemy and item placements and has an experience system so that you're leveling up and so are the enemies, over the course of this random episode.

Yeah, the Duke modding scene.

It's one of these worlds when I realize its total scope and just how much is going on.

I'm kind of thinking, can I possibly live another life?

Can we figure that out?

Because there's no time.

I learn about what's going on with interactive fiction, things like that.

God, if only I had gotten in on the ground floor of this.

I would have had more time to experience the amazing creations that are going on.

Yeah.

Above even that, on weirdness, there is the first of a couple of completely standalone games which, despite they, use a lot of stock Duke assets.

So it's probably not officially legal-legal, but nobody cares.

Demon Throne is Duke Mikamisakai.

He is flying through space on a mission when his ship explodes and he has been spirited away to a magical world where a wizard says I've called you here, Duke of Nukem, to save this realm.

And yeah, it's a big Duke Nukem fantasy adventure with enemies from Heretic Hexen and Doom in there.

I want to play this more than anything.

Some awesome weapon sprites too.

Yes.

It is getting into weird crossover territory.

He literally has like a cannon, like you know, the type that you light the fuse, and he's holding a giant cannon on his shoulder as one of the weapons.

Yes.

Yeah, there's two playable characters.

There is the Duke of Newcomb and there is some medieval knight that nobody cares about because he's not Duke Newcomb.

It does feel like an alternate world in which we had never mastered polygonal graphics and we just continued making Build Engine games with Duke Newcomb.

Yep.

And then, at the absolute most absurd point of Build Engine modding, is the AMC squad, which has been in development for I think like six, seven years now, and is currently up to episode five of a planned six.

Each of those episodes is a full FPS campaign that is like 10 hours long.

There are 15 playable characters, each with their own full set of weapons and enemies to fight.

And each of the levels is.

It is set in a post-Duke Nukem world where Earth is left without a hero and an Avengers-like hero organization has formed and almost all of the playable characters are the developers of the mod doing their own voice work.

So it is charmingly arrested development goofiness, like the kind of thing that you would have made as a cringeless 16 year old, but these are all like guys in their 30s and 40s And it is so goofy.

It is so over the top.

And...

It's really good.

And whatever feature that you could imagine that they could have crammed in, they have.

Between missions, you have a base, XCOM style, that you manage.

And you do research based on enemies that you've scanned on the previous level.

And you can go to the Duke Burger restaurant to buy buffs for the next mission.

And then you go to the command center and, oh, you've got a world map and you can zoom it out.

Oh, it's a solar system map.

And you zoom it out further and, oh, it's a galactic map.

And you can go to like other star sectors and say oh, this planet has resources on it and I can put mines down there to like generate resources between missions.

What the heck there is intergalactic economics in this duke nukem mod with 15 different self-insert fanfic characters.

I mean, i mean this all sounds very impressive.

But if i'm honest, as soon as you said post-duke nukem world, i'm like nope, no duke, i'm not in.

No, I kid.

And thank you for giving me all of these things to play.

They sound very cool.

I would have ignored this aspect entirely, Dominic, if you were not on this podcast.

So thank you for bringing this to the table because it's exciting.

It's just amazing what people are still doing with technology.

A lot of people would consider outdated.

Like, why would we use build?

We have polygons now.

Let's have fun with those.

But you look at what they're doing here and it's like, oh, this is still so viable.

In Duke Nukem 3D, the base gameplay is still...

It's still very timeless, even though we have we have progressed in terms of how we're displaying first person shooters.

On that note, the AMC squad.

One of the changes they made in an update, like two years ago, they removed all of the enemy hitscan weapons.

If you are strafing fast enough, you can dodge bullets.

Oh, nice.

That's so cool.

They have learned so much over the years.

The design has slowly iterated and changed to become more technical and modern.

As a tangent one thing that technically isn't a Duke Nukem mod, but is also very Duke Nukem.

Sirius Duke 3D.

Right, I saw this.

For Sirius Sam Fusion, which is a full remake of the classic Duke shareware episode in the serious Sam free engine with every bell and whistle that you would imagine for that, including full VR support.

Okay.

Now you sold me right there.

I love serious salmon.

Yeah.

If you don't think there's enough official Duke Nukem 3d content, people are out there making an infinite amount right now.

Yeah, and it is like you can be Duke Nukem, massive beefy arms and all.

And it works shockingly well.

Wow, okay.

But also the last thing is an upcoming project that many people have been waiting on.

As Stuart and I were talking about before this podcast, Duke Smoochum 3D.

Yes is a massive ongoing political satire project about Duke Nukem visiting Britain during its darkest, stupidest times of the past decade and living through every dumb headline that was in the newspapers.

And there were a lot of them.

We really fucked up quite badly.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

It is...

The entire thing, there's constant clips and screenshots being released.

Almost every British political scandal and political faceplant of a decade has been boiled down into a Duke mod.

I've mostly been focused on how stupid America has been over the past 10 years.

This could help me learn more about another country through Duke.

It is undoubtedly educational, and you will learn that we're no better over here.

Yeah.

I'm looking at that now.

And I see one that has Rishi Sunak announces general election.

You just roll up there and throw an egg at him and like rock a boom box.

It's been digitized as a sprite.

Yep.

It's very sort of heavily comedic, but it's going to be so dense that it's going to be very exciting to explore when it finally launches.

So instead of Brexit, do we have Dukes it?

Or is that going too far?

Oh, that's a good idea.

But thank you.

Thank you, Dominic.

This is incredible.

This is all available, very easy, like a Google search.

So if you track these down, they're totally worth playing.

I might dig into some of these when I have some time, but I'm just glad to know this world exists.

People are still having fun with the Build Engine game.

We do have to wrap up very shortly though. now 15 years beyond forever i think it's safe to go back to duke nukem 3d and say this is its own thing nothing to do with that awful sequel go back enjoy it and just see that the character can be a lot of ironic fun and you can have a lot of fun with the very clever level designs and these interactions that are that sometimes are not even in modern games it just it is very impressive to see what they could do in 96 and then like with dominic's uh subject matter here what people are doing with the build engine even today so uh hats off to duke nukem 3d any any final thoughts here yeah so like one of the things that really stuck out to me is like we're all still playing games like this right between doom the duke community quake and i've thought a lot about like why is that like what makes these games so good and along the way i'm revisiting other shooters from newer eras when you get to like the ps3 360 era I find that a lot of shooters, they're designed to be played by following scripted scenes.

You're basically following dude to door, guy opens door, they show cut scene.

You might fight a few guys that are far away from the character, using scopes and such, and then it moves on to the next scripted scene.

You have no agency there.

You're just following what the designer said you need to do.

Yeah.

That stuff isn't actually that fun on replay.

Like it may make it for a cool experience initially, but so many shooters are limited by this.

So like the quote unquote boomer shooter genre is a game style where they just drop you in a map.

You have all these tools available in the form of weapons and other things, and you just have fun.

And it's just pure mechanical bliss.

And that's why it holds up.

For me, it's all about those secrets.

It's all about the exploration, and that's what's missing.

I like Call of Duty, but when it's telling you, follow Reznov, do exactly as he says.

Oops, you didn't do exactly as he says.

Start over.

I mean, I would kill for a fake wall with a medikit behind it at that point, you know?

Yeah.

For me, um like, we talk about boomer shooters as like a monolith, but um no like, build engine particulars right, everything's like spawned from duke 3d is a very specific flavor of combat.

Like duke 3d, blood shadow warrior all of them have that hyper twitchy, high like boom or bust combat environments that you need to explore intuitively, as you would in real life.

There will be objects under or over things and you need to like, not just look for the big, shiny object like set up for you on a pedestal.

And this has carried through to a new generation of games.

You have got Ion Fury, which released a few years back with an expansion more recently.

And that runs on the Duke 32 engine and was made by people from the Duke Nukem modding thing.

You've got Sulaco, which is, despite running on the GZ Doom engine, feels like a build engine game because it has that same highly destructive, like fine-grained interactivity built in.

And you've got Cultic, which the second episode came out for recently.

It is only a two-episode game.

And that is... despite it running on a completely custom engine made in Unity, I believe, it feels and looks and sounds like a build engine game right down to the low color depth, the bit crushed audio, everything.

Like this Duke Nukem had kids and they are out there living at large today.

I think, if I can, just I mean, maybe this is misguided, but for me it's like they've taken all the best elements of action games and the correct elements of immersive sims.

Obviously it's not an immersive sim, but the level of interactivity that you have, the exploration you have to do, the inventory, it does tickle that itch that you are fully exploring.

You're not just like stumbling across things.

You have succeeded in finding this secret route.

You have succeeded in finding another way around an obstacle um, which is something that really isn't in doom.

God bless it.

But duke offers something between the msem and the action, with a heavy focus on the action.

Yeah, I think you're all nailing it.

I think the real appeal of Duke Nukem 3D is just how reactive the world is, especially compared to very, very scripted shooters today.

There's just a lot more possibilities in Duke Nukem 3D.

It's so much fun to play with it.

Different things can happen every time.

You play the level, which is fun, which is not necessarily what's going to be happening in a more modern shooter, or like a polygonal shooter that came 10 or 15 years later.

Yeah, but it's the excellence of the level.

Design is the final word on it.

It's just.

It's just terrific the way they loop upon themselves, the way you find new ways to get to areas that the jetpack, for god's sake, and then they make it so that, when you do decide to experimentally ascend as high as you go, there is something there for you to find.

There is always something for you to find, and that's why it's such a masterpiece, in my opinion.

It used to be that Doom and its kin were called corridor shooters, and Duke Nukem isn't a corridor shooter.

The corridors link these big set piece environments where you always have a decent amount of freedom to move around and approach each encounter as you wish.

Indeed.

Well, I hope you've all sold everybody on this.

Please play Duke Nukem 3D.

Still very good today, but we are going to wrap up.

This has been Retronauts.

I've been your host, Bob Mackie.

You can find us wherever you find podcasts, or if you want to support the show and get all the podcasts ad-free and also access a huge amount of bonus podcasts, go to patreon.com slash retronauts. and sign up for five bucks a month you get ad free podcasts you also get access to two bonus podcasts every month we've been doing that for now i think over five years so there's a lot of bonus podcasts they're all full length they're all waiting for you behind the paywall at patreon.com slash retronauts and that five bucks a month also gets you a daily or sorry weekly column and podcast by diamond fight so if you want to support the show get a ton of bonus stuff don't have to listen to ads go to patreon.com I will do my personal plugs last.

Let's go around this virtual room, talk to everybody.

Let's go with our new guest first.

John, thanks for being on the episode.

Where can we find you?

What are you doing lately?

You can find us over at digitalfoundry.net or youtube.com slash digitalfoundry.

We are now independent as of last year.

So we're just trying to make some cool videos about tech and retro and all that good stuff.

And you can also find me on various social medias as Dark1X, an old 90s name from around the time of Duke Nukem.

I support Digital Foundry and The Independence.

That's also very great.

Thank you.

Dominic, how about you?

So I have a very SEO optimized name.

So you can just search for Dominic Harrison on DominicTarrison.com or DominicTarrisonBlueSky.

And you will find me where I showcase lots of mods, indie games, the niche and unsung in video games all over, and you can also find me in most issues of pc gamer magazine on the shelves awesome and stewart.

How about you?

Uh, you all know me.

I'm on retronauts and i've got a book out called all games are good.

Please buy it, because then i get money.

And, of course, like I said earlier, I was Bob Mackie.

I will continue to be Bob Mackie.

And you can find my other podcasts on the Talking Simpsons Network.

That's wherever you find podcasts.

We've got Talking Simpsons, a chronological series about the Simpsons.

And What a Cartoon.

We look at a different episode of a different cartoon every month.

Those are like, again, like I said, wherever you find podcasts.

Or you can go to Patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons.

Sign up there.

Support that podcast.

Get a ton of bonus stuff.

We've got shows about Futurama, King of the Hill, Mission Hill Batman, the Animated Series and The Critic at Patreoncom slash Talking Simpsons.

But that is it for this episode of Retronauts.

We will see you again very soon for another episode.

Take care.

[Retronauts: Celebrating the Innovative Chaos of Duke Nukem 3D]-[749: Duke Nukem 3D]

📋 Summary

The Enduring Legacy of Duke Nukem 3D: A Retro Perspective

The "2.5D" Revolution and the Build Engine

Personality and the "Badass" Archetype

Level Design and Interactivity

The Thriving Modding Scene

Conclusion: A Timeless Classic

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[Retronauts: Celebrating the Innovative Chaos of Duke Nukem 3D]-[749: Duke Nukem 3D]

📋 Summary

The Enduring Legacy of Duke Nukem 3D: A Retro Perspective

The "2.5D" Revolution and the Build Engine

Personality and the "Badass" Archetype

Level Design and Interactivity

The Thriving Modding Scene

Conclusion: A Timeless Classic

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🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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