Randy Pitchford is standing onstage, surrounded by stripper poles, assuring us that Duke Nukem Forever has a release date, that we are going to play a healthy portion of the game, and that it is all really happening. After being the subject of so many years of development time and the butt of so many jokes from the press and the public, it's surreal to hear someone speak of the game in such direct terms, especially since I'm sitting in front of an Xbox 360 showing the game's logo, ready for me to push the start button.
"Duke Nukem 3D was the first commercial game I worked on as a professional developer," Pitchford tells us. He's speaking in low tones, very solemn for a man who endured a catcall ("take it off!") just a moment before. "We were in a spot when the bad news happened. Remember the story? It was May of 2009, and the story was that 3D Realms was shutting its doors, laying off the team, stopping development, and it was over; the dream was dead. The story was Duke was dead. And you can't kill the Duke, man."
Duke is, in fact, alive and well. And we have proof.
This is Duke's home
At a preview event for Duke Nukem Forever in Vegas, Pitchford continued to talk about his devotion to the game.
"I did not want to live in a world where there is no Duke Nukem, and that's the world we were facing in 2009. So we did it. We jumped in. Sometimes I've said that I bought Duke Nukem, but the more fair thing to say is that George and Scott sold it to me. I feel really humbled that they trusted me with their brand," Pitchford said.
Their goal was to fulfill the original vision of the game, not to take it over and put their own stamp on it. Pitchford told us there will be no tricks in the code we were about to play. We wouldn't be jumped around to the best sections of the game. We would start at the very beginning, and we would get a solid look at the state of Duke Nukem Forever as it exists today.
"It's just a raw look at the game," Pitchford said to the press. And we picked up our controllers.
There are hints of titties, but no actual titties, at least in person
Before we jump into the game itself, I should talk a bit about the surroundings we were in as we played the game.
Shuttles, complete with unattended stripper poles and large amounts of internal neon, picked the journalists up from their hotels and brought them to Deja Vu, a strip club located near the Vegas strip. My own shuttle, however, left earlier than I was expecting, so I was stuck taking a cab to the event. I had only the address to tell my driver, but he recognized it right away and then turned to me conspiratorially. "You know my friend," he said, "I have seen much worse. You do not need to be ashamed of going to the titty club." I thanked him for the advice, and walked past the storefronts selling fetish gear and ornately designed plastic penises to the sign-in desk.
The even had a strange tone: people who are clearly emotionally attached to Duke Nukem as both a character and a game were being very serious about the title while we interviewed them in the back rooms of a strip club. Scantily clad women served drinks, and the monitors and video game systems were set up around the tables. I was uncomfortably aware that I was setting my laptop and notebook down on an area where someone was gyrating nude the evening before. Each table had a pole in the middle, and the posters around the club had been replaced with Duke-specific branding. It was odd to see camera crews and game writers standing in the lap dance section of the club, waiting to speak to this or that member of the Duke Nukem team.
But while I have been critical of this sort of thing in the past, it worked in this case. Duke Nukem is a character that revels in sexism and juvenile behavior, and that means a lot to a generation of gamers who grew up with Duke Nukem 3D on their PCs. As Steve Gibson from Gearbox told me during our own interview, where is the humor in games these days? Sometimes you just want to blow shit up and see some titties.
If anyone is going to be upset at the choice of venue, they're going to really hate the game. If anything, having the preview event in a men's club made sure anyone not into what Duke was selling would stay at home.
Playing Duke again
Duke Nukem Forever is set in the same world as Duke Nukem 3D, and references to that original game pepper the levels we've played. It has been over a decade since Duke fought and destroyed the alien invasion, and now he's the most famous man in the world. Women want to be with him, and men want to be him. He has his own casino; he has his own video game—which took 12 years to create; he complains loudly in a nice touch of meta-humor—and he's getting head from two blonde twins.
They are called the Holsom Twins, modeled after a certain set of child stars, and they love Duke and each other very much... and very graphically.
Now, before I tell you what I thought of the game, it's worth recalling a bit of history: this property has been developed by two different teams, taken over a decade of work, and been ported across a series of engines that are now well past their prime. The fact that it exists at all is rather impressive, not to mention that it's in a playable state.
The truth has to be told, however: the game simply does not look very good.
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