A long-lost Duke Nukem prototype resurfaces after 24 years

It’s strange to think that once upon a time, Duke Nukem—Johnny Bravo’s sleazier cousin and poster child for videogame violence—was a cornerstone of gaming culture. No matter how inappropriate, he could be found on any and all platforms, from the original monochrome Game Boy to N64 and beyond.

Time-travel misadventure Duke Nukem: D-Day (alternatively ‘Man of Valor’) was going to be the big man’s first outing on PlayStation 2, developed by now-defunct studio n-Space, makers of two PS1 games in the series. Despite being reportedly close to finished, the game got canned and never saw the light of day. Until now, as a 2001 prototype build featuring 12 playable levels leaked onto the Internet Archive today.

The kind soul that uploaded this prototype says that an unserious person might consider this version “90% complete”. And they’d be right, in that there’s technically a lot of game here, but it’s obviously unfinished. What we’ve got here is still an interesting bit of history, both thematically and in the art preservation sense.

While there’s no cutscenes or voicework in this version, it seems to contain all the key action beats, albeit in somewhat skeletal form. Duke starts out in a contemporary strip club (of course) before going back in time to battle the Third Reich and their alien allies on the beaches of Normandy, eventually culminating in storming the alien mothership in the Antarctic. Not quite as fanciful as the earlier Duke Nukem: Time To Kill (which saw Duke hopping all over time and space), but shooting Nazis never gets old.

The controls feel like a hangover from the PS1 pre-dual-analogue era, with the left stick turning and running, shoulder buttons strafing and face buttons letting you shoot, jump and do a Max Payne-esque sideways dive to evade fire from an assortment of Nazi troopers and their reptilian alien pals. Weapon drops are few and far between in this prototype too, although Duke’s infinite-ammo golden Desert Eagle seems to solve most problems, and fires as fast as you can mash the button. While much of the meat of the game seems to be in place, it’s raw and lacking in connective tissue. In short, in this state, this isn’t a game to be played casually, but it’s great to see something previously thought lost made accessible.

You’ll obviously need either a PS2 capable of running third-party software (mine is sadly in a dusty storage box somewhere) or an emulator like PCSX2 to play this prototype. I couldn’t quite find the optimal emulator settings to make it play nice, so many textures (including skyboxes) were a glitchy mess, but it was playable enough. This being an early prototype, n-Space kindly left a bunch of debug tools accessible, including the option to hop straight to any of the levels, so you can get a good look at what they were cooking without too much effort.

The uploader also mentions that the game was in development all the way until 2003, meaning that there could, somewhere, be a much more finished and polished version of D-Day just waiting to be unearthed. Fingers crossed that it doesn’t take another 24 years to dig that version up, too.