Boy can I feel the breeze coming over the edge of that precipice even now. The breeze being powerful disdain and the precipice being the conventional wisdom that no one is realistically going to do what I am about to suggest anyway. Nonetheless as the title of this post suggests I have some thoughts on the man, myth and legend that is Duke Nukem. Thoughts on where he has been, where he is now and where could he possibly go from here? Some might say this is a lost cause, some may say it's a foolhardy venture, most will say nothing at all. It's been a while since the words 'Duke Nukem' were mentioned in the same sentence as the words 'good game' but I think there is a basis from which we might reverse the cruel fortunes of Duke Nukem Forever. How you may ask? Read on...
This one has been sitting somewhere in a dark corner of my brain for a while. What to do with a problem like Duke Nukem? Consider for a moment the yawning chasm of quality that exists between Duke Nukem 3D and its notorious successor: Duke Nukem Forever. One a treasured classic of it's time and possibly for all time, the other a bizarre time capsule of prolonged, troubled game development. Consider the gulf in time that elapsed between these two games as the now infamous development of that sequel slowly unfolded across many years and many game engines.
Duke Nukem 3D arrived in 1996, Duke Nukem Forever belatedly arrived in 2011. A whole generation of gamers grew up in that time as past glories faded and new contenders emerged to capture the imagination. Duke faded into a weird semi-obscurity where it's mere mention elicited eye-rolls more than awe. The good times were long eclipsed by a never ending wait punctuated by missed deadlines and empty guarantees of the quality of the final product. Then after much drama the sequel finally arrived and as we all know now, it was astoundingly mediocre for a game over a decade in the making.
I was one of the fools who would eventually put down a pre-order for the game after Gearbox bought up the rights and completed development on the development hell to exceed all others in the video game industry. Despite the reigns being handed over to a company that were determined to release a finished product, I think even then there was healthy sceptism that this game would ever actually see the light of day. The world that heard the promise of an 'immediate' sequel to Duke Nukem 3D was a very different one to the world that would finally get the follow up many years later.
Nonetheless Duke Nukem Forever arrived, no escaping that. There I had it, a physical game right there in my hands! I took it home and I played it from beginning to end over the course of the next few days. Emphasis here on the 'few' as I don't think it took too long even accounting for my efforts to pad out the experience as much as I could. It was not a long game, it was not an especially well crafted game and as everyone knows by now, it was not a good game.
I won't go into an exhaustive list of its many failures here, the internet has you well covered for the full story around the development and release of this game. Being kind to it the best I can say was that it was an uneven game that occasionally bordered on the outer fringes of fun. The gameplay was wildly uneven, the jokes were out of date. Several years out of date actually and I doubt they were that good to begin with. The game tried to be a bit knowing and self aware and failed to here too as that approach doesn't quite work when the core gameplay is just so by the numbers. The whole thing felt like a patchwork of its many years of development, a flawed but honest reflection of a development process that changed course and pivoted multiple times by the time the whole mess was over.
Sometimes games can be victims of their own success, victims of hype they can't possibly meet and expectations that were never too grounded to begin with. Duke Nukem Forever was not one of those games, this was a mess that was patched together in the eleventh hour and released to a gaming audience that had long since grown bored or amused with the entire debacle. The excitement around a fourth mainline Duke Nukem game had long since subsided, there were neither high nor low expectioans, there was little of nothing and as a fan of the glory days, this was all very sad to behold.
The core shooting just wasn't good enough in an age where Call of Duty, Halo and Killzone had long since hit their stride and arguably perfected the art of the modern first person shooter. The developers clearly struggled with translating the tone and humour for an audience that was probably going to take issue with simply lifting the edgier more risque humour of Duke Nukem 3D into a more modern game. At times it almost felt like anti-humour, the jokes guaranteed only of a groan before the player swiftly moved on.
As for me I completed the game, then naturally I tried and failed to rationalise my purchase before moving on to better efforts. An inglorious episode in my gaming history and a game I will likely never return to again. So time went on, the game industry marched forward and despite the new IP owner we didn't see much of anything new done with the property. Think it popped up as some mostly cosmetic DLC in Bulletstorm and that was about it. The Duke was now relegated to the memory vault of popular culture, consigned to slow but certain irrelevance.
It's a shame but certainly not a surprise given what transpired. It didn't need to be like this, certainly enough time, effort and money went into Duke Nukem over the years that for me at least I think it deserves more than a slow slide into obscurity. Generations have grown to adulthood in the time since Duke Nukem 3D. If anyone remembers the IP at all these days its mostly fodder for online content about the perils of bad project management and the inability to keep focused on your objectives. A cautionary tale and a distant one at that.
So to finally get around to the point what would I do about it? Putting on my hypothetical gaming hat and divining current and future trends in the video game industry, what would yours truly do to course correct such decline? Assuming here that the decline is not irrevocable I think it comes down to a few things and here I will list them off like they are no big thing whatsoever even though I know it takes a whole lot of work to make any of this possible. At the heart of it I think it requires a healthy balance of looking back and looking ahead at the same time. All while not falling on your ass in the process. Yes much worked well in Duke Nukem 3D but it is not 1996 and I think it requires more than a willingness to ride the wave of retro nostalgia to right the wrongs of the past. It's not an unthinkable prospect in itself of course, the boomer shooter has had a successful revival in recent years. It's just I think a little forward thinking will be needed here as well.
So yes it's backseat game development tips from someone with no business providing such guidance to all the people out there who actually know what they are doing. Self awareness in mind the following are only the broadest of thoughts and none of it is actually underlined by any actual experience of game development. So first things first and I almost feel like a coin toss is in order here as two things come to mind simultaneously.
So let's say I flipped an imaginary coin in the air and it came down on the side of gameplay and what you do about it? Duke Nukem 3D was a smooth, fluid experience for its time. Everything felt super responsive and the weapons felt really impactful. It was all channelling a surreal hyper reality filtered through 1980's action films and whilst never realistic, it was a fun game engineered for optimum mayhem. The enemies were distinctive and varied, the level designs provided just the right amount of challenge. It just felt so polished and fun to play.
Duke Nukem Forever had some fleetingly fun moments with the gunplay but it just didn't measure up in any meaningful way at all, it just didn't feel consistently good throughout. First person shooters had hit their groove for a while before Forever came out and producing a so-so experience just wasn't going to cut it. Had the core gameplay been better it may have even softened the edges of its other failures but it wasn't and it didn't. Again I appreciate this is hard to do, just produce great gameplay like that alone doesn't require immense work but I feel it's almost a given that this has to be the main focus for any future Duke Nukem game in order not be dismissed at face value.
Now would I make such a game a hyper-fast fluid shooter in the manner of a Titanfall or an Apex Legends? Probably not, that feels like a modernisation too far. This is where I would draw a leaf from the current wave of late 90's inspired shooters in terms of the pacing and the action. Maybe give him a slide to get out of the way last minute but I think we can do without the wall running and he mid-air bullet ballet.
Now alternatively say we flipped the same coin and it came down on side of the writing. Now I'm not going to put Duke Nukem 3D up on the pedestal of all-time great video game writing. Games have long since moved on from quoting quippy one-liners from film and television. That said for the type of game it was in the era that it was released (not to mention the audience it was released for) the writing was great for what it was trying to do. Punctuating the over-the-top violence with some genuine laughs at a time where genuinely funny video games were a rarity. Yes, very little of it was original and certainly they don't make quotable action movies like they used to so any future Duke game would have to wrestle with that problem.
You know what is out there though? People who can write comedy and action in a knowing way. This might be a tangent too far but here I am thinking of Adult Swim and all the great comedy that came from that stable of animated shows over the past two decades. There are a good few examples I could draw on here but first and foremostly I am thinking of The Venture Bros and their stalwart defender Brock Samson. A character that's hyper masculine in a way that feels sincere and grounded but also kinda absurd. I really feel like that's your template for Duke in any future games. Don't pretend that he is an enlightened role model for modern man, lean into the flaws and the out-of-time world view. With a little irony I think you can smooth off the worst edges of a humour that wouldn't pass workplace HR today. It's less about what he says and how its framed and contextualised within the absurdity of the world in which he exists.
Speaking of the world it should be an extension of the character in some ways. Duke Nukem 3D was paper thin in this regard but it made for some really fun and innovative level design. Think of the heightened sense of reality you get in films like the original RoboCop. In our world that character would be a monstrous over-reaction to the problem of crime and punishment. In the world of RoboCop though he fits like a glove. For Duke the world shouldn't be too far removed from our own, it should be comically exagerated in such a way as to make the return of an old dinosaur like Duke a plausible possibility.
Think here of Warhammer 40K, how ostensibly the good guys in this setting are super human holy warrior zealots. Not by any sane measure the 'good guys' I think we can all agree but they exist in a world where hell is real in the form of the warp and its populated with actual demons who will do worse than just kill you. They are an extreme response to an extreme problem. The world of Duke Nukem would be a less extreme example of this, infused with a certain over-the-top turbo charged absurdity as pig cops attack and aliens invade but hopefully you get my drift here.
Whilst on the subject of the world in which Duke exists, I think we can address one of the bigger elephants in the room here. Now I don't consider myself an easy person to offend and generally I think politics of every variety these days is infused with a moral purity that no one can live up to but we really do need to talk about the women. Which is to say I think we can easily tone down the objectification of women without making Duke Nukem a saint or a paragon of virtue.
I can't remember if any one specific comedian has ever said this but I do recall someone somewhere voicing the view that when it came to the dirtiest jokes, it was often the women who laughed the hardest. This is all to say that any future Duke game doesn't need to be a sanitised preachy affair that admonishes masculinity or 'the male gaze' before getting out the manifesto for an eye-rolling lecture. I think people have more time for risque boundary pushing humour than you might think, it's more a matter of the quality of it and how well it's put together. Again yes I am aware that writing funny comedy is a task way harder than I make it out to be here. It takes time but then again so does game development generally.
Anyhow I think that covers most of the main areas I can think of. There is of course the music and here I feel like you can lapse into nostalgia in a similar way to the 2016 version of Doom which gave some of the original soundtracks a death metal face lift and a whole new lease of life. Then there's the general presentation and I feel like you can go full throwback or dive into the latest Unreal engine and get distinct benefits either way. I'm not married to either idea and it would very much depend on the game itself and what direction its makers wanted to take. The marketing would need to be centred around the essential absurdity of a living action movie stereotype being called back to action in a world that neither understands him or knows how to respond to him. Suffice to say there is a job that needs doing and everyone else is dead. Or let's say you would have to be extremely brave or extremely stupid to take this job on and 'Oh hey Duke!'. Again fine tune it as desired in accordance with whatever form the game takes but I feel the approach gives you some wiggle-room whilst also delivering the main character that most of the audience will expect.
I don't mean to make light of the work that goes into making games generally. I appreciate this is all hard work that takes time, effort and experience. This is just my hypothetical mission statement, a thesis that I put together in my head a while back. Nostalgia is a powerful force, we haven't had a good mainline Duke Nukem game this century and I would sincerely like to see a revival in some way, shape or form. Hell at this point give it to some hungry young developers with a point to prove, give us some wacky spin-off or off-shoot like Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project, Duke Nukem: Land of the Babes or even a Duke Nukem: Time To Kill. There I think I have definitely met my daily quota for name dropping obscure games now. All fun if not flawless experiences anyway and I'm pretty sure someone out there will have the appetite to deliver something in the more modern vein. I refuse to believe Duke Nukem Forever was the final nail in the coffin. To any future developers of the Duke Nukem franchise I say only this, whatever you do, don't take a decade to do it and don't make it completely underwhelming. I don't think these are unreasonable hurdles to overcome. Anyhow that's enough from me for now, join me next time for several thousand words discussing at length why there has been no new Destruction Derby game in over twenty years and why this is an ongoing scandal we should all be appalled by...
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