Pip: I didn't really play Duke Nukem in any meaningful way, back in the day. And Quake! Build was my fave though, definitely, though that’s more to do with Blood than Duke. But I’d definitely have been under the Build engine banner, which is alarming considering how much I love Doom. If id engines had been Blur and Build had been Oasis, I’d have totally failed to see why they were in some kind of press-manufactured Britpop competition. That lack of abstraction that I praised it for earlier might actually make the level design a bit less interesting in some ways. Romero’s Doom return certainly seemed self-aware of that kind of playfulness, though I’m not sure Duke has ever really been about that. It’s fascinating and I’d hope for some of that. It’s the working with tools that aren’t quite able to make the kind of architecture people might necessarily want and the ways to circumvent that, all the little tricks and illusions. There is something about nineties FPS level design that I adore. Levelord wasn’t around for those, not sure about the rest. The ones who’d wandered away and not really worked on FPS level design for a good while rather than the people who worked on Forever and Bombshell necessarily. He made a hidden object game recently! I think the idea behind the new episode, or at least what I thought was the idea, was a getting the band back together kind of thing. Levelord is a name I do mostly know because he wrote it in a secret I found while trying to cheat my way through a boring level.Īdam: Levelord is the one that comes to mind for me as well - I didn’t even know his real name until I googled it this morning. I’ve similarly enjoyed seeing John Romero rediscover Doom mapping, though I suppose he’s a name I mostly see positively - a maker of a many classic maps for many classic games. I think more recent Duke outings, and their last HORRIBLE game, Bombshell, suggests they might not have the same finesse these days.Īlice: I’m up for it! I’m always curious to see ‘90s level designers return to their games years later, seeing how time and games in-between have changed what they make. John: I’d be excited if it were to have been discovered on a hard drive in the attic of one of the developers at the time. Is anyone actually excited about a new episode of Duke 3D? Anyone here, I mean. I reckon I spent almost as much time on that first level in deathmatch (or Dukematch or whatever the fuck they called it) as I did playing Doom and Quake. It was the first time I’d ever seen levels in an FPS that felt like real places - the cinema in particular - and I think it does fade fast, losing that sense of place that was the most impressive thing about it, but DAMN, it was exciting to play. I loved it back in the day and I still replay the first few levels every now and again. The original Duke Nukem 3D that is, rather than the platformer that came first. Today, we've been thinking and chatting about all things Duke, from wonderful level design to wonky nipples and weird space tigers.Īdam: I haven’t played the World Tour yet, which adds a new episode of eight levels designed by the original Duke 3D crew, but I am extremely fond of the original. Years of development hell later, he also appeared in Duke Nukem Forever, a game remembered more for its delays than its eventual release. Mr Nukem is actually twenty-five years old, however, having appeared in two platform games before his FPS adventures. Duke Nukem 3D turned twenty this year, which means it can get away with drinking hard liquor and smoking cigars in a strip club legally in some parts of the world, but might not think that’s as cool as it once seemed.