That's not to say Duke Nukem 3D didn't have a delicious cake hiding under its lurid layer of frosting. Sure, maybe a set of pasties stood between me and True Nudity, but that two-frame 'shake it, baby' animation (from a stripper who, in retrospect, looks like a Minecraft project) taught my teenage brain the wonders of Duke Nukem.ĭuke Nukem's relationship with women is.

The prospect of nudity brought me to the series, though, before you judge, please remember this type of titillation didn't come easy before advances in Internet technology made the most horrific pornography immediately accessible to any child.Ī friend with the game had been talking up its most salacious features, and when I went to his house to confirm what, at first, seemed like your typical playground rumors, he turned out to be telling the truth. Duke Nukem 3D released just as my adolescence reached critical mass, and 3D Realms' ambitious first-person shooter provided all the unnecessary violence, sexual content, and profanity my developing brain craved. This week: That Frankenstein's Monster of a first-person shooter, Duke Nukem Forever.įor a good decade, no punchline in gaming had more of an immediate effect than the words 'Duke Nukem Forever.' As the '90s slipped into the '00s and Duke's high-octane brand of machismo aged about as well as the leathery faces of our real-life action stars, Forever-clearly a nod to Batman's mid-'90s fall from grace-allowed us to distance ourselves from the character we'd fallen for so long ago.

Every Thursday this August (and occasionally one Saturday in September), Gaming's Greatest Flops will examine one of our industry's biggest failures in an attempt to understand what went wrong.

Duke nukem forever development time