I certainly know what it meant back in 1997, when I first got my hands on such a crude, violent and yet well-crafted video game, perfect in every detail. I was coming from years of platform games on the Master System II, where the maximum splatter was up until that point the highly praised Robocop Vs. Terminator, in which human enemies exploded with just one shot. In Duke 3D, the violence did not stop at the simple explosion of the unfortunate alien, but went further, with a sarcastic remark from the protagonist directed at the enemy just dismembered, with bloodstains on the floor created by the protagonist’s boots passing over what was left of the antagonist. The climax was at the end of the boss fight of the first episode (the only one I owned, at the time), where the protagonist, after threatening his enemy that he would decapitate him and defecate inside him, actually does it!
Duke Nukem 3D was an exaggerated melting pot of the pop culture of that time, extreme and made even more scandalous. No matter if the authors’ intention is to denounce that type of culture by making fun of it or to exploit its popularity by proposing an exaggerated version, it was all BEAUTIFUL and I loved that game down to the last pixel. So, how has aged a First Person Shooter that makes masculinity, violence, and the presence of topless dancers its signature? Do you really want an answer? Because I don’t. I don’t want it, I don’t have it, and I don’t believe it really exists.
A videogame so much a product of its time that it even quotes contemporary cult films (like Army of Darkness) that were influential at the time but certainly do not represent the history of cinema, is very similar to the various parody films, like Scary Movie, which are no longer very popular today, that used to come out annually and were already old-fashioned the following year because everything that had been spoofed until that moment was irreparably passé. And Duke3D is like that. So what remains of this FPS? A solid, first-class gameplay, with a very specific artistic direction. All contained within the limits of an engine that was already surpassed by the eternal masterpiece Quake, which arrived a few years later in my gaming career. Is it still playable today? Certainly, especially if played with just the keyboard, as attempting with the mouse is useless since the title itself is misleading, being only “partially” 3D. And this last statement rings even truer to me when I think back to the various editions I replayed on consoles, where the high resolution and freedom to rotate through analog sticks clash with sprites of monsters and items simply incompatible with modern screens. The best way to play this gem, difficult to digest in 2024 but still great when contextualized in its time, is to equip yourself with a cathode ray tube and a PC with Win 98.
