Or “the late 1900s” as it is now called
If there were two things I was obsessed with as a pre-teen, it was Duke Nukem and sight-seeing. Those two things may be related. When Duke Nukem 3D was released in 1996, first-person shooters were widely using very abstract level design. Doom 2 was supposed to have levels that were set on Earth, but did it actually look like Earth? Not really.
Most of Duke Nukem 3D was set in Los Angeles. While its best-designed levels all took place in space, the most memorable and interesting ones were set in movie theatres and drive-thrus. I can’t describe how exciting this was for me at the time without sounding really stupid, but just trust me, it was amazing.
With that in mind, the Duke It Out in DC expansion pack was mind-blowing. I didn’t get to play it right away as a kid – not until I borrowed a friend’s Kill-a-Ton Collection – but I remember vibrating with excitement at just hearing about it.
E1M3
Duke it Out in DC is exactly as it sounds. It transplants the action of Duke Nukem 3D to Washington D.C. Or at least the best representation that could be managed in Ken Silverman’s legendary Build Engine.
It was developed by Sunstorm Interactive, who were essentially Duke Nukem’s second family. The designers behind it went on to release another expansion, Duke Carribean: Life’s a Beach and the spin-off Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project. Duke it Out in DC is a pretty modest start. While Duke Carribean would have a tonne of new assets created for it, Duke it Out in DC heavily repurposes ones from the base game.
The most amusing example of this is the level based in the Smithsonian Institution. Placards were just cropped from an image of the map appearing in the E1M3, and a lot of the art exhibits are just wholesale textures presented as modern paintings. Honestly, I love to see it. Points for creative re-use of assets.
Bad enough dude
The plot is really generic “save the president” stuff. We already know Duke is a bad enough dude. However, when you think about it, why did the aliens just attack L.A. to begin with? Washington D.C. isn’t the center of the world like some people think it is, but L.A. definitely isn’t that important.
Duke it Out in DC starts your tour off in the White House. You then move onto the National Mall, the FBI headquarters, the Smithsonian Institution, the Capitol Building, and then it runs out of ideas. You’re put through a sewer level and one on the metro, both of which are ideas that Duke Nukem 3D already used in the base game. To be fair, the sewer ends in the Pentagon, but only briefly. I also feel like having a sewer terminate at the Pentagon could be a clever analogy, but I’m not going there.
The point is that Duke it Out in DC is very uneven when it comes to the quality of levels, and it largely sags in the middle. The first few D.C.-themed levels are great, but then you hit the Smithsonian, which is the worst of the whole bunch. It’s a large, sprawling area that has a very mystifying critical path and a lot of superfluous places to search for keys.
After that, the Capitol Building level feels unfinished, and the next couple are the metro and sewer levels. You’d be forgiven for giving up there, but the “Dread October” level, while not being very D.C., is probably the best designed of the expansion. The last one, set in an underground bunker, isn’t a slouch either.
Build Engine Chops
The developers at Sunstorm were more adept at using the Build Engine than your usual modders. I’m assuming this is because they’d have a hotline to 3D Realms. However, they use some of the fancier technical trickery the engine is capable of. The aforementioned Dread October level uses the classic spiral-staircase technique to create a multi-storied level rather convincingly.
On the other hand, the team doesn’t have the same chops as the original level design team. Even the best levels are built more around concept than flow. They’re really nothing egregious, but when you stack them up against the base game – and it’s impossible not to – they don’t fair well.
For that matter, needing to be compared to Duke Nukem 3D is probably why Duke would never find the same success again. Having to stack up next to what is literally and without hyperbole the best first-person shooter ever created is always going to lead to disappointment. And that’s what you get here.
Maximum ’90s
Duke it Out in DC is at least an interesting curiosity. It’s maximum ‘90s. Duke Nukem 3D is already one of the most ‘90s games in existence, but then Sunstorm went the extra mile.
The president you’re trying to save is none other than Bill Clinton, and there are pictures of him along with Janet Reno in all the government buildings. It’s made more amusing by the fact that the Duke Nukem games are supposed to be set in the near future. It reminds me of that episode of Pinky & The Brain when they’re time-traveling. They go to the future, and the U.S. is still being led by the disembodied head of Bill Clinton. It’s like everyone thought the ‘90s were just never going to end. We had reached the peak of human existence, and we were ready to dig our heels in.
For that matter, I’m surprised there was no outcry about Duke it Out in DC using a real-world environment as its battleground. Considering politicians were targeting violent games pretty hard back in those days, they really missed an opportunity here. For that matter, after the January 6 Riots at the U.S. Capitol Building, someone could have pointed at it and said, “Look! This wasn’t the result of radical political partisanship! Duke Nukem was training people for it.”
Maybe I was just a sensationalist pundit in a previous life.
Not nothing
That’s sort of how Duke it Out in DC still proves its relevancy. It’s not only just more Duke Nukem 3D, which is never a bad thing, but it’s also an interesting time capsule. Certainly, the expansion is not as indispensable as the game that it was spawned from, but it’s worth seeing all the same.
It’s just too bad that it’s not really available anymore (Update: Apparently it is available through the Zoom Platform). The Duke Nukem property is owned wholly by Gearbox now, and despite Randy Pitchford getting his start at 3D Realms, they don’t seem to have much reverence for the series. If anything, they seem to just love the character and not understand that it was the game that made him great.
So, we had Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition, which had its flaws but was, at least, a rather definitive collection. They replaced it with Duke Nukem 3D: World Tour, which omits the expansions in favor of some levels created by the original developers. It’s not nothing, but it’s less than ideal, which is a phrase you could apply to basically everything involving Duke these days.
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