Duke Nukem 3D Turns 25
If you are not familiar with Duke Nukem and his murderous and sexual exploits, you probably had a sheltered upbringing and are zero fun to be around as you avoid booze and drugs and respect yourself like a goddamn nerd. Fucking nerd…
BUT, I digress. Initially, Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem 2 were 2-D side-scrolling shooters that were released in the late-80’s and early ’90s. For the third installment of the game, 3D Realms reimagined the series for a more modern take and updated graphics.
Duke Nukem 3D’s premise was, what if Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sly Stallone, Jean-Claud Van Damme, and Bruce Willis had some weird romanesque orgy and somehow impregnated Dolph Lungren. Lungren spits out a baby, and that baby was The Duke. Mind you, during their orgy, they purposefully left out Steven Segal for being a greasy-headed, obnoxious, and bloated piece of shit. These are their words, not mine. Everyone knows a 90’s action star orgy is quite picky on who they let in.
Styled much like the beloved Wolfenstein 3D and Doom games, The Duke became a brash, titty loving, cigar-smoking, alien murdering bro. He even used catchphrases stolen from movies, like, “I ain’t got time to bleed,” “It’s time to kick ass and chew bubblegum,” and my personal favorite, ” I’ll rip off your head and shit down your neck!”.
This tongue in cheek tone of a first-person shooter was much different than the seriousness and scary demons of Doom and the Naziness of Wolfenstein, which automatically makes people think of the holocaust, which is depressing. When playing as The Duke, you felt like a badass. He made you laugh, and you got to blow shit up.
As a 9 or 10-year-old boy, I dove right into this game. It had everything that a growing male mind yearned for; Explosions, swears, aliens, and most importantly, boobs.
1996 was a much different time for kids growing up. It’s not like today, where kids have one-click access on their phones to the most horrific shit on the internet. These kids see DVDA, scat, and throat torture porn videos on the regular. In super-realistic videogames, they can disembowel POW’s and casually cause genocide (I’m looking at you, Pickmin) without batting an eye. Shit is different.
The fact that I got to see a pixilated boob with a pastie on it blew my fucking mind in half. I’m not sure I could even get a boner at the time, but I was sure I fucking loved it. I would have Duke throw money at those strippers like Pac-Man Jones after he had punched a cabbie. I can’t remember how much time I spent in front of the screen playing this game, specifically, in front of those strippers, but I’m sure it was a lot.
When I had my fill of chucking cash in a stripper’s face, I would go off and murder, and murder I did. I would murder to my heart’s content. And boy, Duke Nukem 3D made the murdering fun. You could shrink people and stomp em’, shoot dual rocket launchers, and throw pipe bombs at mutated anthropomorphic pigs that were once cops (get it?). It was pure and unmitigated fun. I’m not sure I even completed the game, but I know I played it constantly. This game was tailor-made for a young hormonal brain, or honestly, anyone who liked a good laugh. I’m really surprised Tipper Gore didn’t crusade against it at the time, because it was everything she hated; it was fun. Good lord, that woman went after anything enjoyable at that time.
Duke Nukem 3D was one of a kind and something no one has been able to replicate with the series. Every game with the name “Duke Nukem” on it after was horrifically bad. You could feel that a company’s claws were trying to cash in on the “XTREMEness” of the original serious, and it came off as forced and lame. They need to leave it alone.
There is no way to replicate it in the first place; kids are too desensitized, and people are too sensitive at the same time. So they need to let Duke die in peace. He’s a pensioner now, anyway. It’s like trying to make wobbly kneed, HGH headed Sylvester Stallone do another “Expendables” movie. Fucking Unnecessary.
So, I’m here to say, “Cheers” to Duke Nukem 3D. Thank you for the fun times and the first animated bare breasts I have ever seen. You were one of a kind.
