Let’s think about fifteen years. Duke Nukem 3D was released in 1996, to quite some acclaim and success, adding different kinds of freedom to the early first person shooter genre. Fifteen years before that, 1981, was before any kind of Duke Nukem, and before the very dawn of the British game charts I’ve used for this journey. Before the Commodore 64 and the ZX Spectrum, too. Before Manic Miner, before Elite. A very different time for games. While there was not yet any Super Mario Bros., Mario was right there in Japan’s most successful arcade game of the year, Donkey Kong. Some through lines could still be drawn across fifteen years, and beyond.
Fifteen years is of course the time period to think about because, in the other direction, that’s how long it took for Duke Nukem 3D’s sequel to come out. Fourteen of those years were spent developing Duke Nukem Forever in some form after its announcement, although its satirical intro in which Duke plays a long-delayed Duke Nukem game has the wait as “twelve fucking years”. Like the Guns ‘n’ Roses album Chinese Democracy, which took a mere eight years, the delay became the dominant story around even the finished product. In the UK it reached #1 for one week before being replaced by a climbing Zumba Fitness. No more Duke Nukem games have been released since.
Duke Nukem Forever displays its delayed nature everywhere, in ways intentional and otherwise. It plays like an updated version of a 1996 first person shooter, rapid and straightforward movement-based shooting mixed with new elements. It’s not the 2011 zeitgeist that it is updated to, though, but somewhere around the release of Half-Life 2 in 2004, when more complex physics were exciting in themselves. You can push things around, make things tilt, solve some puzzles like climbing on giant statues of Duke. Extending the novelty further, you can drive around in a remote control car as a miniaturised Duke, making big jumps in between bouncing on sofas.
It is at least nice to play something a bit different, but it is not just the style of gameplay which feels suspended a decade earlier. The game does not look remotely good for 2011. The interactivity of its environment is poor by the standards of both other 2010s games and Duke Nukem 3D. It makes this unfortunately obvious when, for instance, it gives you a shotgun in a box accessed by following the instruction “break glass in case of alien invasion”, next to some very evidently unbreakable glass aquariums. Worse, particularly given how basic it is, the loading times for levels are astonishing, interfering a few times in each setting and making every death and reload into a slog. It is too complex to benefit from the elements of simplicity it does retain. Then there are the attitudes.
The game is ready to put up Duke Nukem himself as a creature of ridicule at points, trapping him as an unneeded intruder in a museum of himself. In going so over the top on all the juvenile guns and swearing and piss and boobs, that’s meant to be the deal: to shock and to satirise at the same time. It just doesn’t feel either fresh or coherent enough to do much with that. Grand Theft Auto and others ran with that approach after Duke Nukem 3D, and eventually came round to adding some layers of sophistication while still taking the same base pleasures. Duke Nukem Forever is still left behind with one-dimensional fantasy women named in the subtitles only as ‘Female’ and ‘MILF’.
The single biggest indicator of how out of time the game is comes from the Duke’s main babes. I recoiled at Test Drive Unlimited 2 going for a Paris Hilton parody earlier in 2011, but Duke Nukem Forever outdoes it with its own target for an even more blatant parody being the Olsen twins. It retains all the unsavoury misogynistic elements it would have had when they were more prominent, but can’t even be as edgy as it clearly wants to be. It’s hard to be anything other than sad and stale seven years after their last film together. As with most of Duke Nukem Forever, it’s the parts which feel least like 1996 which are the most dated.
There’s also a bit of an additional irony now visible in looking further on from when Duke Nukem Forever emerged. It missed its chance to remain within the original FPS and lad mag era of the late ‘90s, and missed the mid-’00s updates of both. A few years later, though, could have been another matter. Another five years and a Duke Nukem revival would have fitted snugly with 2016’s Doom reboot. Even less of an additional delay, and it could have arrived into a world where video games were the booming centre of culture wars, with a ready audience of the worst people in the world. To say that it was too late would be an optimistic oversimplification.
Top of the charts for week ending 4 June 2011:
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