Duke Nukem 3D: Duke it Out in DC is maximum ’90s
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.
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
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