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Depending on where you stand the Duke Nukem series is either a trashy blight on the games industry, or a shallow, but fun diversion. For myself, The Dukester will always provide a sense of nostalgia unlike most series.
Around the time Duke Nukem 3D came out I was in middle school. Before then most of our gaming had been on my old beat up NES or his shiny new Sega Genesis. Doom started us playing games on our PCs. We discovered it as a piece of shareware on a trip to our local mall and it changed how we games completely.
Soon, my best friend and I would often go halfsies on PC games, and we would exchange the latest shareware disk as soon as one of us found a new one on the counter of our local EB Games.
When we got our hands on Duke Nukem, we instantly fell in love with it. It had guns, babes, aliens, and more explosions than we had ever thought possible.
A few years later in high school, a few of the school's computer nerds managed to get the game installed on the computers in the computer lab and would play over the school's LAN connection. Once my best friend and I found out about it we stormed the lab and asked if they would let us play. It became a regular habit and soon we all had the game installed on our home computers. Getting it installed was a bit more work for me, since I was never great with computers and my computer hated me with a passion. I ended up having to get one of the guys I played with at school to help me out.
His name was Will Grist.
He patiently walked me through how to find the right drivers and helped me navigate DOS. Once we were all operational, playing Duke Nukem online became an almost nightly activity, and it remained so for almost a whole year.
As time does, new things eventually came out and we all started playing different games. Since then, only Goldeneye has captured my attention for gathering all my buddies together to play a game as a group. Sure, I have played with friends here and there, but never with the regularity of my year with The Duke.
By the point Goldeneye came out, I was in college. I was still a major gamer, but had done a horrible job keeping up with my old gaming buddies from The Year of The Duke. I still kept up with my best friend, of course, but the rest of the group kind of went their own way.
One day my junior year I got a call from my best friend. He told me that Will Grist, who had been so nice to help me out with my computer, had not been feeling well. Because of this he left one of his classes early and decided to go back to his dorm room to nap. As he climbed the staircase to his hall, somehow a piece of a tumor he did not know he had growing inside of his body broke off and traveled through his bloodstream and into his heart, killing him instantly.
Duke Nukem might not be the deepest series in the games industry. While I will never try to excuse its blatant sexism and needless crassness, I will also never be ashamed to stand up and proclaim my dedication to it. I don't know if Duke Nukem Forever can live up to more than ten years worth of speculation, controversy and anticipation. I do, however, know that I will be playing it on day one and remembering an amazing guy named Will Grist and the good times we had during The Year of The Duke.
