𝖢̶𝗅̶𝖺̶𝗌̶𝗌̶𝗂̶𝖼̶ Comeback - Games of 2011 | Duke Nukem: Forever's Damming Identity

In my previous two articles celebrating games of 2011 I’ve spoken about continuing a series and the morphing of identity between entries. Each game you play and every series you dive into has its own unique identity and DNA: something that makes it what it is. With that in mind I want to talk about Duke Nukem: Forever.

Pictured here: the first Duke Nukem game on the PS1.

I won’t beat around the bush here. Duke Nukem: Forever is a fucking abject failure of a game. However that is not to say I haven’t found a way to enjoy the game over the years, it’s just not what I grew up with. I grew up with the spin-offs to the original Build Engine games; Land of the Babes & Time to Kill. To young me, this was quintessential Duke. Pop culture references everywhere, funny jokes and cheesy pick-up lines.

The funny thing is, I don’t think Duke Nukem: Forever stood a chance when it was released. Not because it was a bad game, it was passable. Duke Nukem Forever failed due to Duke himself. This failure can be found all over reviews at the time and it is a sign of time passing and all of us growing up.

Here’s Forever being announced… In November ‘97…

To understand where I am coming from all you need to do is look back to the typical college or university halls of residence of the late mid to late 90s. Back in the heyday of attitude marketing, LAN-gaming and games being made for one demographic, those in suits spending the money cared less. To them, all games were being made for people in these dorms and there were two types of people bunking there. If you played games you were a nerd/geek. If you played football/soccer you were an athlete. You were also a guy. And Duke, he appealed to both of these stereotypes.

Butts, boobs, crude jokes and dated references were hailed as the peak of comedy. People cared about other things but overall, but they certainly didn’t have a platform to be vocal, not when all the stage time went to this bro-centric marketing. The first word you would use to describe Duke Nukem as nowadays is misogynistic. Let’s be real - the dude loves women in a way only socially acceptable in the 90s (and even then that doesn’t actually mean it was actually acceptable). Even then though when you play the original games you get the sense this guy kinda treats women as disposable like damn toilet paper.

This is definitely a hard topic for me to write about. Being a straight male and all. And it would be pretty easy to dismiss what I’m saying considering I genuinely like the Duke Nukem franchise. But at that time, when I was at that age, it was made for me. Dated cheesy one-liners? Over the top action? And a tone that people that didn’t play games “just didn’t get”? It was right up my alley. Years later, I can fully accept that Duke isn't the type of person anyone should look up to or even really like. But at the same time, in this era, these games were the coolest damn things, Duke was the Doom-killer, with an edge that Halo lacked. On top of this people were waiting for Forever for 15 years. 15 years of warped nostalgia and hype. Of course, we still wanted to play it!

This is Forever in 2006. On a completely separate note some games that came out that year included Oblivion, Dead Rising, Okami and Black.

When we frame old media in new lights - it’s easy to see what is and is not acceptable. One of my favourite movies Blazing Saddles (1974) would never fly today. Back in the 70’s a white man could say the N-word and still somehow be sending a somewhat progressive message.

Duke Nukem is, unfortunately, a product of a by-gone era. The issue is: The overtly sexual, steroid pumping, extremely heterosexual Duke is, by all accounts, a massively toxic person. He’s the type of guy - almost every man knows lad like this - who walks into a room, and thinks every woman in there fancies him purely because he fancies them.

The best way to contextualise this is the opening level to Duke Nukem: Forever. You are playing the game that was announced “15 fucking years previously” and the character you are playing as is very obviously receiving felatio. Which while maybe the dream for a kid that just played DOOM for the first time and discovered what sex was a week ago, was pretty damn fucked up in 2011, not to mind 2021.

Fuck you. No. Not showing that.

After a short period of time these two girls (yes there were two), get abducted by aliens. Well, Duke ain’t having that and so he sets out to find his “babes” (his words). This is where things get bad (which is saying something). Around the halfway point of the game, Duke finds them in “The Breeding Grounds”, a place filled with alien eggs and human breasts (that are interactable, because of course, they are). The girls are being impregnated. By the aliens… For the purposes of breeding.  Also, they are crying out to Duke for help… Constantly. This particular area is also filled with jump pads that conveniently look like vaginas and doors that look like an anus, again: no surprises there.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury I present exhibit A: Duke sees these naked girls, heavily pregnant and remarks ‘Looks like you’re… fucked’. The girls cry out they can ‘Lose the weight in a week’ before proceeding to die and Duke is more annoyed that the hot girls died than the aliens invading the planet by forcibly impregnating women. This my friends is where the problem lays.

All those 15 years of development sure were worth it when you look at those graphics…

This scene would have been tasteless 20 years ago, but it also, sadly, would have been accepted. Duke Nukem is in no way politically correct and never has been. I’ve always loved these games and as a result there is a part of me that loves that greezy humour even now. But that shit just doesn’t fly now. I would say another major reason the game failed to reignite even diehard fan’s love for the series was its oxymoronic attitude.

Duke is constantly making quips during all his games but in Forever almost every single one falls flat. A prime example is when he is offered some power armour for the fight. His rebuttal: ‘Power armours for pussies’... fancy explaining your regenerating health? 

Another great way the game sours you on it is dated references to much better games. Find a dead guy who looks like Isaac from Dead Space - ‘That’s one dead space marine’. Barrels being thrown downstairs and when you reach the top: ‘I was expecting a monkey’. Or how about Private Jenkins who rushes to his death only for Duke to say “Damnit Leroy!”. Better games and unfunny dated references. If you want to mock something - you’d better be funnier than the thing you are pointing fun at.

Overall, like I said I did enjoy this game when I got it, but replaying it - I see what the critics have been saying all this time. The issue is ultimately that Duke Nukem is a product of his time. Bringing him into the present-day as they did in Duke Nukem: Forever opened a can of worms nobody wanted to deal with in 2011. To compound this, every year the game somehow gets worse. New things are found to be not socially acceptable, and Duke Nukem has been doing all those things for some time. If Duke Nukem was an actual person he’d have been cancelled 100 times over by now, and nobody would feel bad for him.

It has been a pleasure to edit this post about you. Now leave and never come back.

Thanks.

If the game was good then many of these issues could have been brushed aside by those that just wanted to fuel their nostalgia some more. But after 12 years in development hell, the political and social landscapes changed and Duke didn’t. Duke Nukem: Forever fights to keep the identity of the character alive in a world that has progressed to realise that, unfortunately, Duke Nukem was never cool - he was the worst type of man imaginable. 

Duke Nukem:Forever is an over the top romp, but it feels like a last stand for a deal ideology. Someone trying to go out in a blaze of glory with a multistage fireworks display that in the end was about exciting as a sparkler.