Duke Nukem 3D Turns Five!

Today is a landmark day in computer gaming. Five years ago today, we released Duke Nukem 3D v1.0 shareware episode. January 29, 1996 was the day we released Duke Nukem 3D to the world, and interactivity in computer games was taken to a whole new level. Duke Nukem 3D was the first 3D action game to include all the tools that the designers used in making the game on the CD, a practice that is fairly commonplace now.

One year later, on Jan 29, 1997 - we released LameDuke - LameDuke was an early Duke Nukem 3D beta that we decided to release solely for the purpose of letting people see what the game looked like during development - you can get more LameDuke info here.

Today, five years later, the game is still having levels and mods made for it, even as far newer technology has come out. A game can't still be having this level of user modifications for it this many years later, and not have something going for it.

For the two or three of you who still haven't tried Duke Nukem 3D, why not check out our Duke Nukem 3D page, where you can download the demo, view some screenshots, or check out some cool behind the scenes photos of the game's production. The shot here is of George Broussard standing in Joe Siegler's office on Monday, January 29, 1996. What he is pointing at is one of Joe Siegler's computers uploading Shareware Duke Nukem 3D v1.0 for the first time to Software Creations.

And what did our own Charlie Wiederhold do on this day? In his own words.. "I spent my 19th birthday on the computer waiting for the demo to come out so I could mirror it on my personal webpage at UT. I was so freakin' pathetic."

Posted by Joe Siegler on January 29, 2001 at 6:10 PM | Permalink
News Categories: Duke Nukem 3D