Duke Nukem is out of action — thank god. Image courtesy 3D Realms.It's time to put Duke Nukem out of his misery.
With this week's collapse of 3D Realms, the videogame developer that has been working on Duke Nukem Forever for more than a decade, the series' future is in doubt. And that's a good thing.
Despite some wailing and gnashing of teeth in forums dedicated to Duke, most gamers seem to have dismissed the news of Duke Nukem Forever's probable cancellation with an apathetic shrug.
It's no wonder: In games and movies, we've moved beyond the cigar-chomping, catchphrase-spouting one-man army embodied by characters like Duke. These days we like our heroes, and our antiheroes, a little more human than that. We demand a solid story and a little thoughtful introspection alongside our explosions.
We've seen this kind of cultural shift in Hollywood already. In the '80s and '90s, the box office was ruled by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone as they single-handedly killed thousands of aliens, terrorists, soldiers and clones of themselves. 1985's Commando, a film that epitomized the badass-with-a-big-gun genre, made 57 million dollars, despite being one of Schwarzenegger's worst vehicles. Terminator 2: Judgment Day, one of his best, made half a billion.
Those were the days when, not coincidentally, the Duke Nukem games were originally released. We've become more sophisticated since then. Our tastes have changed.
Vin Diesel, an actor once hailed as the heir apparent to the throne of Hollywood's top action stars, has seen little of the success once foretold for him. After breaking into the scene with the excellent Pitch Black at the beginning of the millennium, he's bounced from role to role, only finding true financial success in teen-centric series such as The Fast and the Furious.
Pitch Black's sequel, The Chronicles of Riddick, saw relatively middling returns, even with a big marketing blitz and the established strength of the character.
Similarly, brawny big-screen stars of the past saw downturns in the genre that made them celebrities two decades ago. 1999's End of Days, a supernatural action flick starring Schwarzenegger, barely recouped its $130 million budget.
We still love our action heroes, but we love them with a touch of humanity. Instead of simply fawning over men with huge muscles, we crave the tortured superhuman archetypes of comic book films, like Hugh Jackman in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. We're drawn to Robert Downey Jr.'s believable portrayal of a playboy in a weaponized suit of armor in Iron Man. Characters like these deliver huge explosions and cool-as-hell quips before offing the bad guys, but they also give us a glimpse of the human condition through their emotional turmoil and actual acting.
So too with videogames. Gamers have traded in the one-dimensional leading men of Doom and Unreal for titles like the wildly successful Half-Life, with its character-centric saga that mixes intriguing storytelling with run-and-gun action.
Games like Halo, Gears of War and BioShock embraced this blend of action and drama. Nowadays, any game that lacks deep characterization or plot is widely seen as a throwback, like Serious Sam, if it's not simply ignored. Videogames heroes, just like action stars, have grown up.
In this cultural climate, is it any surprise that no one seems to mind that we may never play Duke Nukem Forever? The Duke character has always been, at best, a caricature of the now-extinct big-action genre. At worst, he's a misogynistic relic of a bygone era, kept alive only by the hubris of his creators.
If it had been completed, Duke Nukem Forever could have earned mild success if only for its extreme notoriety as a multiple winner of Wired.com's Vaporware Award. But the gaming landscape has changed so extensively in the past decade that nothing short of completely destroying and rebuilding the franchise — a la successful Hollywood reboots like The Dark Knight and Battlestar Galactica — could truly make it a best-seller in a genre that's packed with triple-A efforts.
Perhaps Duke hasn't been canceled after all. Maybe 3D Realms will sell off the rights, or otherwise find some way to complete its magnum opus.
Then again, cancellation is probably the best thing that could happen to Duke Nukem Forever. Let the Duke rest in peace, an antiquated hero for simpler times.
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