Duke Nukem 3D

Did You Know?

• The development budget was roughly $300,000, with a team of 8 people for most of the cycle, increasing to 12 or 13 near the end.
• LameDuke, an early prototype, was released as a bonus one year after the official version, featuring four episodes: Mr. Caliber, Mission Cockroach, Suck Hole, and Hard Landing.
• The game sold about 3.5 million copies, with 950,000 units sold in the United States from 1993 to 1999.

Plot

Duke Nukem 3D takes place on Earth in the early 21st century, immediately after Duke Nukem II. Duke is returning home in his space cruiser, planning a vacation in Los Angeles, when unknown hostiles shoot him down. As he sends a distress signal, he discovers aliens are attacking the city and have mutated the LAPD. Duke ejects from his ship and swears to stop the invasion.

In the first episode, L.A. Meltdown, Duke battles through a ruined Los Angeles, gets caught by pig-cops, breaks out of an alien prison, and pursues the alien cruiser to the San Andreas Fault. He kills an Alien Battlelord and blows up the ship, learning the aliens were abducting women. The second episode, Lunar Apocalypse, sends Duke into space, where he finds the captured women held in incubators on conquered space stations. He reaches the alien mother ship on the Moon, kills an alien Overlord, and discovers from the ship's computer that the abduction plot was a distraction—the aliens have already launched their attack on Earth.

The game is packed with humorous pop-culture nods: Duke's one-liners come from movies like Aliens, Dirty Harry, and Pulp Fiction; players find corpses of Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones, and Snake Plissken; a hidden tunnel behind a poster mirrors The Shawshank Redemption; and a Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey serves as a teleporter on the Moon.

Release

The shareware version of Duke Nukem 3D, a first-person shooter from 1996 by 3D Realms and FormGen, first appeared on January 29, 1996, as version 1.0, offering only the first episode for free. It saw updates to version 1.1 on February 20, 1996, and version 1.3D on April 24, 1996. The full game, also version 1.3D, launched on April 19, 1996, with 3D Realms shipping it to customers on May 5, 1996, and even streaming the packing process via webcam. This full version includes three episodes and the complete Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem II as extras.

An expansion called the Plutonium PAK came out on October 21, 1996, updating the game to version 1.4 and adding an eleven-level fourth episode. The Atomic Edition, a standalone release on December 11, 1996, included the Plutonium PAK content, bumped the version to 1.5, and introduced two new enemies (the Protector Drone and Pig Cop Tank), a new final boss (the Alien Queen), and a new weapon (the Expander). Unlike the full version, the Atomic Edition does not include Duke Nukem or Duke Nukem II.

A Macintosh port by Lion Entertainment Inc. arrived on June 6, 1997, shipped by MacSoft. Later compilations featuring the game include East Meets West (1998), Duke: The Apocalypse, Duke: The Apocalypse 2, and the Kill-A-Ton Collection (1998).

Source ports

After the Doom source code release in 1997, players sought a similar release from 3D Realms. The last major game using the Duke Nukem 3D source code was TNT Team's World War II GI in 1999. Its programmer, Matthew Saettler, obtained permission to expand gameplay enhancements to Duke Nukem 3D. EDuke, a semi-official branch, was released as a patch (Duke Nukem 3D v2.0) for Atomic Edition users on July 28, 2000, focusing on enhancing the CON scripting language.

A further version was planned but cancelled due to programmer time constraints. The source code to the v1.5 executable, using the Build engine, was released as free software under GPL-2.0-or-later on April 1, 2003, while game content remains proprietary. The first port came from icculus.org, enabling play on AmigaOS, AmigaOS 4, AROS, BeOS, FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X, MorphOS, Solaris, and Windows. Another early project, Jonathon Fowler's JFDuke3D, received backing from Build programmer Ken Silverman in December 2003, using Polymost, an OpenGL-enhanced renderer for hardware acceleration and 3D model support.

A related project called xDuke runs on the Xbox. Development was semi-active between 2005 and 2020, with new versions regularly published.

Reception

All versions of Duke Nukem 3D earned positive aggregate scores on GameRankings and Metacritic. The MS-DOS original holds 89% on GameRankings and 89/100 on Metacritic. The Nintendo 64 version holds 74% and 73/100, the Xbox 360 version 81% and 80/100, and the iOS version 64% on GameRankings. Daniel Jevons of Maximum gave it five out of five stars, citing speed, fluidity on low-end PCs, imaginative weapons, varied environments, true 3D level designs, and strong multiplayer.

A Next Generation critic summarized that it has everything Doom does not while retaining Doom's classic elements, praising the weapons, campaign, multiplayer, level editor, and parental lock. Reviewers focused on the sexual content; Tim Soete of GameSpot found it morally questionable, while Game Revolution noted it was done in a tongue-in-cheek manner and was not personally offended. GamingOnLinux reviewer Hamish Paul Wilson later commented that the dark dystopian atmosphere helped ground the game's obscene moments in context.

Next Generation reviewed the Macintosh port positively, calling it an impressive feat for both the game's features and port quality.