Retronauts - 749: Duke Nukem 3D

Episode Date: February 16, 2026

As the sun was setting on the 2.5D FPS, one game emerged to pull out all the stops: Duke Nukem 3D. While Duke 3D was mostly known for its brash main character and his many violent acts, those who actually sat down to play it realized that 3D Realms' creation actually contained some extremely clever level design and a variety of player interactions that just weren't seen in the mid-90s. Duke Nukem Forever might have left a stain on the legacy of Duke, but we're here to remind you that, even 30 years later, his initial 3D outing still kicks ass.This week on Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Stuart Gipp, Dominic Tarason, and John Linneman as the crew hails to the king and replenishes their supply of bubble gum.Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get two full-length exclusive episodes every month, as well as access to 100+ previous bonus episodes, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com/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 innovated 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. 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 Suez'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 Harrison. I'm a regular at PC gamer and many other sites. and retro FBS is a passion. Excellent. And who else?

Who's our final guest? Yes, and I'm John Lenneman from Digital Foundry, who 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 John. 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 in 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 Newcomb.

Though I think my first encounter was a friend who owned the shareware for Duke Newcom 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. You know, it cemented itself that way. So when I did come to play it later in my life, when it started receiving source sports 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, like 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, like, who was... 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, the balls of on the pool table or like break every single bottle 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 like, 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 RAMs, 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. I bought 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.

It just felt like really, like truly like a next year. 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 share where 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 bold 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 a shame that we have never covered Duke Nuke 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 Nukin

that's like in arguable. In Doom, you're a Marine, sure. You're B.J. Blascoitz in Walthenstein, 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 Kittarne, right? But it was nowhere near the level of Duke 3D. Yeah, and in Dark Forces, Kyle got like two or three voice lines per level, but Duke just talks. Exactly. Like, we'll 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, 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, they could have up the bit rate on this if this was the same wrong.

They probably could have pulled off a floppy version, but, like, the disc also included, like, shareware games on it, as you do. So, it was a good value. Well, yeah, let's get into that. The history of Duke Nucom 3D goes back to shareware. So we have to discuss Duke Nucom 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 jumped into the, 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 Newcomb 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 did. popularize 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 ten 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 offering 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 Newcomb, 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 sicko in a way.

Things like Cosmos, Cosmic Adventure. I love, Biomeness, 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 Evocate as far as I'm concerned, and I really hope it's coming to other systems at some point. Well, true, Stuart, you can't actually download, I think, the Regal engine. Yes, for the Evergate runs, runs on and use it on a PC, so there is that. Oh, that's, I thought that was only for Duke 2 so far, which I like on a less fun, though.

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, and I was just like interested in testing that, right? Like I 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 size 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 heard. 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 Keene in the original Duke Nukem. They were popular for offering, in a way, console-style gameplay on the PC.

And if you go read the bookmasters 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

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 could only use X amount of tiles per screen. So you end up with a lot more repetitive elements on screen. So doing those 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 speed game. Very fast, but with a gun. Yes. We didn't give Sonic a gun until 2005.

Yes, exactly. Very fast to its territory. You could move as fast as Sonic the Hedgehog. And unfortunately, that meant that you had like a temp 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 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.

I completely thought about that guy. The only reason anyone knows about him is because of this Duke, Newcomb. It's the only time it 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's with him. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, just kind of the extreme hedonistic narcissist. I love him very much. and I'm very sad that they ruined him. Yeah, I was, just before we started recording,

I was describing Duke as Johnny Bravo's slightly sleesier 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 Apogh's Todd Rapogel 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 Apuji invented the sublabel 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 Realm's episode at some point, Apogee 3D realms, but they don't really persist that long as a relevant gaming company past the 90s. like Duke Nook 3D, I think, is like 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 2.5D 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 Realm's 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 bullet storm, TLC, or a re-release storm 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 Bullet Storm, whose name escapes me. But it wasn't a Duke game. I guess there was World Tour with the new episode, it will 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 2.5D first-person shooter,

something that's very hard to describe, but 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 arrived. And I know there are other experiments with fully political 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. So 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 was so many others. And like, 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 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 radiyaki and some other not so great stuff but then you had origin systems doing the ultimate 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 bethesta 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. And then, yeah, there was the Wolfenstein clones I mentioned, like Blake Stone, for instance, Corridor 7 from Capstone, which is important. There was Heretic from Raven, you know, which used 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's soft we're going to do next and everybody was like waiting for this quake thing. But in the background, of course, you had, well, apagy and 3D realms 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, how, like what is a 2.5D FDS? Because it's like, in terms of putting it out, spelling it out in words, it's really hard. hard to do. But once you see it in the experience that 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 and 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. 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 recasting 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 know, you'd go around, and Wolfenside 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 or angles on the walls, it was extremely limited. Whereas Doom, this was where John Carmack came up with its 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 X, Y 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 free the engine. does some really fancy shenanigans, effectively, with portals. Because it isn't, like, you will find many, like, multi-floor buildings in Duke 3-D. They aren't actually multi-floor. They are, in fact, separate buildings, separated horizontally, but with a portal, like, in the gap between them.

Yeah. But you can see between the two spaces. I think my build engine experience ended when I had to try doing this. net and I realized, man, this is way too hard. I'm not going to be the next level lord, I don't think. But yeah. It feels like kind of a flex. The first thing you do in, you can 3D is fall down an enormous shaft onto the

lower, onto the streets. And then you're able to climb up onto the building walls through the window into the building. Like, 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. It's 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, spelled like Christopher Walken, I believe. And this was designed to offer very much similar, similar capabilities to what Wolf's 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 Wolfens

3D clone, but far more colorful and arguably kid-friendly. Like, I'm not sure if that was the point, but it's a, it's a very different vibe versus Wolfenstein 3D. 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 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. 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 Shat in there, I believe. And it's a 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 like we had that concept like it was almost like comfortable now to cruelty squad of all things you're dude you're so right like stew bob if 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 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 think there's a preliminary source port somewhere maybe, but it might just be for Witch Haven. I feel like I have Dosboxed TechSport

and I probably, without the manual or anything, just bounced off it. I don't know, well maybe I was frightened away by willing. The thing about Tech Horse do is that even I actually have a period appropriate at 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 like a bit of and honestly, it's not worth it. It's not that good, but come on, it's got, they try to simulate a city with pedestrians, it's got a working train system. It's got all this like

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 builds new features such as slopes and other advanced 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 uh 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 missed that era. We can never go back. But they were able to do things that weren't possible with I'd's engine. They could do slopes, jumping, blowing holes and walls, lots of interactivity and more on that aspect as we discussed 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, implemented in the game very, very easily. Just because you're not working with, you know, 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 FAC II. He was one of the, I guess, eight FPS celebrities of the late 90s early odds. I just remember his name in conjunction with him being made fun of for being called Level Lord. Oh, yes. Unfortunately. But, hey, he is still level-lording it up, as far as I know.

That's great. More about Duke Nukem 3D. 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 and 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 enable 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 Grotam-Rooten Route 66 and Redneck Rampage rise again. And obviously, obviously I quite like Redneck Rampage. It's me, you know? 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 are 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 we have to talk about? Oh, yeah, the personality of Duke himself.

Well, he did not have a voice until producer George Brousard found some inspiration while playing the LucasArts adventure game Full Throttle. That game starts 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 like make a comment, that's about it Yeah, and voice acting was so rare back then That like games like sold separate upgrade packs On like an extra like 10, 15 floppy discs Just to add voice acting Yeah, the voice of Duke Because he exists in this world That is just so a pastige 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 a parody of what it is and then what forever did is they 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 Nookam 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. Yeah. 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 Newcom saying them. But actually, it made me seek out Army of Darkness and they live. So, hey, the plagiarism led to new experiences. It's a shame that Duke Nukum forever didn't try to plagiarize a 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. It's kind of, I mean, I feel like Army of Darkness could support a boom a 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, like,

Oh yeah. Online game. I actually enjoyed that, but it died so quickly that it was like, well, evil dead, dead, you know. Yeah, 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. 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. No, they're all bad.

You don't want to play Evil Dead regeneration, Bob? 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, Bum. I don't mind. I think I'll be a dead eye by the time I do the evil dead episode. But going back to Duke Nukum, it took about eight people with more added towards the end, roughly two years, and only $300,000 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 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. Toilets, there's a toilet you can go in, and there's an enemy sitting on the top. toilet, which is hilarious, obviously. There's a friggin jetpack that you can find and just fly around at your heart's content. It's just an amazing first level with so many routes through it, so many secrets you can find and so much personality. Right out of 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 2.5D 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 the building. You can blow up the screen to 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? And 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, like, creating a place to explore. I think that the initial, you drop down, you see your like 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 causing on this one. We can. I mean, it's a Duke-Cookle 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 them on the other half of the level. You will, like, go out 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 like you never it's never boring you're never in a boring environment even though it is real it's just it's such an impressive illusion yeah and some of the movie references actually lent to the level design like in i believe the second uh 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, like there were so many references, especially in the secrets. Like, you'd find, like, in one of the space, the moon-based levels, you'd find a dead Luke Skywalker in like 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 like a little pawn on every screen going

And it's sort of the attitude in finding like the space marine from Doom That's one Doom space marina. I think Laura Croft's in there as well And maybe in the PlayStation version There's mockery of Quake. He's not afraid to know 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 So we can't go over all of them. This game was released to Hellen Back on so many platforms. Genesis, Game Boy fans even later in life. So we have the shareware in January of 96, the full game in late April of 96. Then we have the plutonium pack slash atomic edition in November of 96, just in time for Christmas. It's the one that I got.

It adds a new fourth episode to the mix, two new enemies, a new boss and a new weapon. 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. Oh, sure.

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 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 PlayStation because of that. But the frame rate is really, really low. does not run well at all. Actually, I played a lot of the N64 version, so I remember that being a fun version. Stewart. The N64 version, 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 launch. So, yeah, and some enemies were 3D. N64, actually, because of how N64 work, 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 in there, real 3D polygun 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 V-sync on and off on PlayStation for some extra frames. But 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 sleeve. 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 engine. 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 three. take on Duke Nukem 3D from that era, complete with support for the analog controller on Saturn.

So if you want to use 3D analog looking and 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 Junukum on Saturn is so good is because Death Tank Svi. That's why. Well, I mean, that is great. Death Tank and Death Tank Svye, the little mini game in there. Yeah. And heck, I think my boss, Richard Ledbetter, is actually mentioned 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 D.C., Duke Caribbean, Lifes of 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 is 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. I actually did play Duke It Out in D.C. from what I remember back in the day.

But yeah, there was this like 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. Yeah.

When I got the Duke Nukem 3D Atomic Edition for Christmas of that year, I also got just an unlicensed disc that they bought the store with a thousand levels on it. And like that whole vacation was me just like trying every level for five minutes. Yeah, there are so many versions of Duke out there and like whether the 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's own. I think it's the only place you can get it and it's like ready to go with the E Duke engine all built in.

So that's probably the best version to buy if anyone's interested. Yeah, 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 at launch, 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 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 puky 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 2.5B 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 think, I don't know whether or not it's actually been fixed. There's a lot of, 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, that version, though, is it just had, like, 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 PSVita. Oh, yeah. It was just a novelty having

Duke Nukem 3D running that well on a handheld system. I forgot all about that. I miss my Vita. Why don't I say? sell it. I know the Vita's so good. Certainly better than,

I don't know we didn't mention it yet, the gamecom version of 3D. It was, yeah. It basically played like the fantasy star won dungeons, but with like a gun in front. It's just like flip screen between random images.

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 feel like opinions are mixed on that,

but it is still nice to see, like, what would they do 10 years ago with all of the, 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? applied like modern day thinking to it and the answer was always like something really, really special.

I just want Nightdive to release every FPS. I just want everyone else to give up. Just go, here you go. There's nothing. I don't think we're better for it 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 Eduke 32 engine which is like the Voduk equivalent to Z Doom or whatever. It is magnificent. Actually, there's another source port. Rays is it? Rays.

Yeah, Rays. By the guy who basically got driven off the GZ Doom team because he tried to vibe code it. Hmm. Oh, boy. All I can say, though, is that I've actually found that the Rays stuff runs a lot better than E-Duke. E-Duke has, like, weird frame-pacing issue.

and other problems that I never quite was able to solve, whereas that just works better. You don't want to run Eduke using the polymer engine, which is their like higher tech. Oh, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, like that renderer just never worked quite right. No, no, no, no. But even without it, it's still, like,

there's always been issues with it, I've 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 race to play Redneck Rampage. It's 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 let me play a lot more of this game than I probably could have if I just played like a vanilla, a more vanilla duke presentation. But yeah, I wish Megaton was still a Viguan. was still available. I managed to get it before it was delisted, and I feel like that I would not have

delisted that. Gearbox clearly just wanted to sell you another product after acquiring the rights to Doom. So, I'm sorry, Duke. And to be fair, they did give you new levels, but they also remove the DLC levels that Megatondition 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 comes back. So 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 is a kind of Sonic origin situation where it's like if you can't, if you've got to 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 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 the slightly

obnoxious new flame thrower 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 get you on fire. We've been tip-tonged 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. It's just so fun to screw around in the levels of Duke Nukem 3D. And 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 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.

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, even things like just like the very first level, you walk down that hallway into the lobby of the theater and 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. Yeah. Interestingly, they actually implemented swinging doors into Hexon. Yes. Raven Software did that in the Doom. engine. So that was at least possible, but most of the things, not really. So you mentioned a hexan, 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 Hexon or Heretic. And it just adds more variety to the combat, to the way you can get around. Like, 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 that's i don't think that's been used before the 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 of front and backloaded in a way and that this game actually has at least half of it's 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, like interactive elements that aren't just like 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 of actually. Yeah, I think it's a

reasonably common shareware thing maybe i'm being unfair here that 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 uh let's be honest he's new yeah we're saying it here folks oh i want to say that uh i just played like five hours of this game uh to refresh my memory and it 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. And that's because my own metaphor is the world of Duke Nukem 3D is very low budget.

Everything is built out of like digital plywood. So if you need a building to collapse, you just are lowering that sector and then putting Sprite explosive sound of, sorry, spright explosive sprites along the base as it sinks into the ground. And that conveys the idea of a building collapsing. If you would have to program 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. 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. it gives it an edge

and a sense of fun and it's even in things like 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 a 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, like, 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 in the console versions, you didn't really have that option, so they had to be accommodating. I mean, I remember playing this game with just the keyboard, and yeah, 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 really,

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. And it was pretty brutal as a result. But 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 like 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 like slowly like pivoting and walking in a straight line. Yeah, I didn't learn a 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 and 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 jetpack and it just feels enormous to explore. 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 it's not to break the rules, but still give that semblance of being like a real place.

Yeah, you could have like, I. a hole in the floor that led to another room that is technically some place to the side below it. But yeah, you could not have vertically 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 open, some imps are in there.

But in Duke, it's constant varied set pieces and locations. I remember being buffeted down 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 your duton you... It's kind of like a treasure game almost with all of these... Oh, yeah. ...bes up 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 and it was actually useful for seeing enemies. It was not just a technical trick. Like you'd 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 is what's waiting, this is what's waiting for me around this one corner. John. I actually want to mention one thing about the mirrors because 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. 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 ward 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 like a wall there to make it look like a reflection. But it worked. I think it's worth mentioning to some extent. the weapons also the imaginative sort of nature of the weapons changes up your tactics things like throwing pipe bombs around corners that you can then manually detonate um laser trip wires things like that i don't think they'd be and with the shrinking ray where you then step on an enemy which you then later have to sort of use on yourself to become very tiny it's all just really imaginative

and great fun yeah a lot of the set pieces involved uh well a few of them involved getting shrunken down and then having to find your way through cramp 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 yes 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 for minutes on that when i was a kid that was a key so i'm a huge deal when you're like a kid like toilets brilliant you know oh boy

We mentioned this earlier, but like 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 like GTA 5, 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 like bringing us to like 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, okay, 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 can be found all the way back in 1996. Hey, I mean, William Shender'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 more, 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. It just, 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 the 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 worked so well is that they were very much like puzzle boxes that kind of unfurled before the player. The build engine was capable. I mean, both the designers' 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 like little prefab detail objects, like every office chair, every light switch. Those were just like 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 they're a loading screen 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 a 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 Headshot 3 did it. Oh, true. Yeah, yeah. Sonic's always for, Sonic's the pioneer.

Sonic 3 needs a half-life 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 is a weirdly, it's an ACAB game, I would say. It is, yeah. It's a, it's an A-B-B-Bod game, always bet on Duke. But they're also very mad at OJ. Simpson in this game. So they're having it both ways. Yeah. 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 like guilty written really large on one of the walls. You can drop down a sign or something like that. Yeah, no, hold on, but this isn't talking Simpsons.

It's true. 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. 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 Newcom 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, upon 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 was so much stuff in these levels. You're not just walking down big hallways or in big rooms. I found myself like 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. So it's just something you can do in the world. It's not something they're enforcing on you or teaching how to do. It's a natural element of them just being able to build more creative worlds around you.

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 and that's harder to do on GamePad. Yeah, for sure. I mean, yeah, it's like, 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 care 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, like, when there's more than one of them.

Oh, yeah. Actually, that kind of brings up one thing, and I'm curious about you, what you think about this, Dominic, is, and I've always had a little bit of a complaint here. As much as I love it, this game is super reliant on hit scan enemies. Oh, yes. Or they just, like, no matter where you are, how fast you're going, they can just hit you, right?

Where Doom mixed up hit scan with more, like, projectile-based foes, like you think the Imps 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, like, a key to, I think, all the build engine games, and they all have a lot of hit scan enemies. But you also have things like the pipe bombs

that you can bounce around corners. You have the Holo Duke. You have various, like, weapons with, like, big splash damage. You have stuff that can stun lock. It gives you a lot of options, and you absolutely have to use everything that it gives you, or you will die. And I think they knew that, like,

sometimes it's going to be unfair, and you're just going to take damage, which is why they, I think every build engine game has a portable medicate 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. You could, Cornholio is a cheat. Amazing. Teach the kids about OJ and Cornholio. In the early versions of the game,

you could also hold the, I think the Tilda key with the mighty Butte But 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. If you, 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 gene 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 was much harder in 96 than it is today.

Yeah. Duke 3D was one of the first ever games that I played, at like online death match like through like early phone base dial in multiplayer services and it was laggy as hell it was unresponsive and weirdly

enough the hollow duke 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

of the rocket launcher because that weapon, even if you had full health, full armor, a direct hit was instant death. It was like the combat in Duke and all building engine games is extremely swinging. 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 did play some of this as well online on a 144 modem and then later 56K on a newer machine. And I think

that's part of the reason why I think this never took off in a big way. In addition, Quake, of course, comes along. They release Quake World for that. And I do think Quake was just better suited for online play. But, Duke, the understated, the awesome multiplayer mode that it does have is co-op. And that is a blast.

Now, I just... 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. 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 got to say, I did not play Duke match, but I did play Duke match in Duke Nukem 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, 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 sort of 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 we 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 640 by 480 or even 800 by 600, 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 option. Don't 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 Nukamani 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 3E modding has kind of exploded over the past decade, thanks to John may have had issues with it, but everything runs on the E Duke 32 engine now.

It is like the assumed baseline. And like some modders have just used it to make Duke put more with, there's a big mod called Blast Radius, which is like 15 maps, but each of them is like over and. an hour long, they're gigantic, non-linear urban sprawls with all of the interactivity and secrets that you'd expect from Dutnikam, but with just absolutely no limits. Like, you will, like, be crawling through, like, one building for a half an hour solid and emerge into, like, another four massive streets with each with several more buildings to explore. and that's like 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 was meant to be

Duke Nugam's partner in the original version of Duke Natham 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 as he is fighting like alien vampires around New York. And 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 weapons and some special abilities. And there's even some light RPG elements as you like spend money to like by permanent character upgrades or and that's kind of wild. Yeah. Yeah. And that's still not even a fraction of what the fans have done. Also, Alien Armageddon has an amazing

rogue light mode where 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 it's total super. scope and just how much is going on. I'm kind of thinking, like, can I possibly live another life? Can we figure that out? Because I just, there's no time. I learn about like what's going on with interactive fiction, things like that. Like, God, if only I had gotten in on the ground floor of this, I would have had more time to experience. It's like the amazing creations that are going on. And above even that on weirdness, there is, so the first of a couple of completely standalone games, which despite, they use a lot of, like, stock duke assets. So it's probably, not officially legal, legal, but nobody cares.

Demon Throne is Duke Nukam Isakai. 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 have called you here Duke of Nukum to save this realm. And, yeah, it's a big Duke Mucum fantasy adventure with enemies from Heretic Hexon and Doom in there. I want to play this more than anything.

Awesome weapon sprites, too. Yes. It's 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 is one of the weapons. Yep, 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 Nukem.

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 Nukem. 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 Newcomb world where Earth is left without a hero, and an Avengers-like hero organisation 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, 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 like between missions you have a base, ex-com style that you manage and you do research based on enemies that you've like scanned on the previous level and you can like go to your 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, this all sounds very impressive,

but I'm honest, as soon as you said, post-Jute Newcomb 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. I definitely, 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 this, it's exciting. It's like, 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. And like Duke Nukem 3D, the base gameplay is still, it's still very timeless, even though 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 hit scan weapons. If you are strafing fast enough, you can dodge bullets. Oh, nice. 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. The Sirius Amfusion, which is a full remake of the classic Duke Shareware episode in the Sirius 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 Series Sam and VR.

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 has been, that many people have been waiting on. As Stuart and I were talking about before this podcast,

Duke Smucham, Free Day. 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, like there's constant clips and screenshots being released. Almost every British political scandal and political face plant of a decade. has been boiled down into a Duke mod. You know, 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 at 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 a build engine. We do have to wrap up very shortly, though. I'm not sure if we have any final thoughts, but I feel like we have conveyed just how great Duke Nukem 3 is.

And I say that, like I said up front, I think forever really tainted anything that came before it, and that's unfair. And I think 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 and 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 sometimes are not even in modern games. It is very impressive to see what they could do in 96. And then, like with Dominic's subject matter here, what people are doing with the build engine even today. So hats off to Duke Nukem 3D. 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, like, 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 cutscene. You know, you might fight a few guys that are far away from the character using scopes and such, and then it, like, moves on to the next scripted scene.

You have no agency there. You're just following what the what the designer said you need to do. And 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, I mean, sorry, 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, you know, follow Resnov 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 medicate behind it at that point, you know?

Yeah. For me, like, we talk about boomer shooters as, like, a monolith, but no, like, build engine particulars. 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 Iron 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 Nuke and Modding thing. You've got Salako, 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 of the bit. fresh audio, everything. Like, this Duke Newton 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, you know, 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, which is something that really isn't in doom, God bless it. But Duke offers something between the

M-Sem 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 3 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, and it's so much fun to play with it. And a level, 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. 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, 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 and that's why it's such a masterpiece, in my opinion. Like, 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 setpiece environments where you always have a decent amount of freedom to move around and approach each encounter as you wish. Indeed. Well, I hope we'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 Mackey. You can find us wherever you find podcasts, or if you want to support the show and get all the podcast ad-free, and also access to 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 slash retronauts. 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 digital foundry.net or YouTube.com slash digital foundry. 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 media as Dark 1X, an old 90s name from around the time of Duke. 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 at or on Dominic Tarison.com or Dominic Tarresonetterison, blue sky. 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 Stuart, how about you? You all know me. I'm on retro-nops 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 Mackey. I will continue to be Bob Mackey. And you can find my other podcast 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 patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. But that is it for this episode of Retronauts. We will see you again very soon for another episode. Take care. Thank you.