Duke Nukem 3D

Duke Nukem 3D pitted a brash, self-aware sense of humor and cinematic references to nineties action B-movies against the serious, dark aesthetic of Doom and Quake. The hero Duke fights his way through streets overrun by aliens, strip clubs, cinemas, and space stations, dropping lines lifted from films like Alien or Total Recall along the way, destroying interactive environments, and wielding weapons such as the machine gun, rocket launcher, laser rifle, and the shrink ray, which turns enemies into tiny targets that can be stomped flat. The game ran on an enhanced Build engine, which, unlike Quake, allowed even an ordinary DOS machine to run at high resolution and smoothly.

The Build engine brought interactive environments unusual for its time – the player could flush toilets, turn on televisions, break mirrors, operate elevators, and look up and down, none of which was a given for FPS games back then. The level design leaned on recognizable, civilian locations, from Los Angeles to a space base and a lunar colony, and the dense atmosphere was underscored by synthesizer music and a wealth of digitized one-liners that became iconic and were still quoted by players years after release. It also added a wealth of secret rooms and references to other games that rewarded thorough exploration of the levels, and the game supported a map editor, which gave rise to a huge amount of community-made level content.

The game achieved enormous commercial success and, together with Doom, defined the shape of nineties action FPS games, though its signature was humor, pop-culture exaggeration, and confident vulgarity rather than a horror atmosphere. Critics and players alike praised above all the feel of the guns, the fluidity of movement, and the unusually high degree of environmental interactivity, which briefly became a genre standard that other studios tried to imitate. Even years later, Duke Nukem 3D remains a beloved classic, followed by a string of sequels, expansion packs, and remasters, none of which, however, achieved the same combination of exaggeration, action, and the Build engine's technical finesse as the original from 1996.