Can Duke survive in a modern world?

“Duke is Back!”

This has been the rallying cry of Gearbox software since Duke Nukem: Forever was shown to a shocked crowd at PAX Prime 2010. It was one of the industries best kept secrets in recent memory. Quite a feat when you think about just how big a story a new Duke Nukem game is, and how many game journalists and PR people would have been salivating at the mouth to be the first ones to attach their name to that bit of news.

Now that we are beyond the fervor of the initial announcement, and we have gotten some time with the game at hand, the proper introspection can begin. And the only place this discussion could possibly begin is in 1996.

Duke Nukem: 3D wasn't the first Duke game but it certainly was the most iconic. The series had moved beyond the side scrolling shooter of it's previous incarnations and into the Doom inspired realm of the 3D first person shooter. It was anything, however, but a Doom clone. Not only did it have a protagonist with a personality the size of a BFG-9000, it also featured complex level design that took the idea of the sprawling structure found in Doom and compiled it with a 'secret' system that charged the player with not only learning the level, but with also discovering it. The main component of this discovery was interaction. The world of Duke Nukem 3D was not simply a stagnant thing, it could be interacted with. And in most cases it needed to be interacted with in order to progress. Duke Nukem 3D showed that the video game world within shooters could play a bigger role than just mere window dressing, and in doing so bridged the gap between shooters of old and our modern game experiences. To that end, two years later the idea was taken to it's zenith when Valve released Half-Life and created a world that was not just living, but that also played the part of a silent character unto itself. Essentially, the path from the original Doom to Half-Life goes through Duke 3D.

This, I believe, was the main breakthrough which allowed Duke Nukem to hold its current place in video game history. Sure, there was the big breasted women and hint of misogyny, which I don't doubt helped the game become popular with the younger audiences of the day, but this was not the main crux of what Duke 3D was about. If this had been the case, Duke would have occupied the same place in history as Leisure Suit Larry and Custer's Revenge.

The current focus on the cruder side of Duke probably comes from the later incarnations of the series. Games like Duke Nukem: Time to Kill and Duke Nukem: Land of the Babes, changed to a third person perspective and brought a Tomb Raider approach to the gameplay. Reviews were only fair to these later releases and as the gameplay began to suffer, the personality of Duke himself seemed to become the focus. Whether this elevation happened as a maturation of the character, or was added to fill in the gaps that the lack of gameplay left, it is all that is currently left of those games. They are hardly talked about today, but the sizeable personality and temperament of Duke lives on, and the main focus on just this aspect of Duke that may be doing the biggest disservice to the series as a whole. Duke 3D was a breakthrough game, but instead of breaking through and experimenting with new gameplay mechanics and conventions, this newer version of Duke seems to be doing nothing more than expanding upon a lowest common denominator.

But there is even more to it than this. The gaming world is a very different one now than it was in the late 90's. It is older, the average age for a video game player is now 35, and more female, 40% of those gamers being female, than it used to be. The Duke of 1996, and even into 2000 enjoyed an audience that might have been more hospitable to a womanizing strong man, and decidedly less demanding in what they expected a modern shooter to be. In 2011 we could be entering a situation where Duke might be finding himself to be out of step with an older, less male, audience who have been honed on more complicated shooters.

The release of Duke Nukem: Forever, for all the worry and introspection done here, is an event. The fact that it was brought back from the nihility of a cryogenic chamber to the modern world is a feat unto itself. The problem with cryogenic chambers, however, is that as you stay in timeless unchanging space, the world moves on without you. For Duke to truly come back he's going to have to cherish those things that made him great, hold them close, and make a mad dash for the common era.