It’s been a good week for old school Mac gamers so far: On Monday Ambrosia Software’s classic arcade game Apeiron rose from the dead to play natively on Mac OS X. On Tuesday, MacSoft’s classic first person shooter Duke Nukem 3D was revived. Ryan Gordon, the programmer who’s brought the last two Unreal Tournament games to the Macintosh platform, has spent some time creating a Mac OS X-native version of this old favorite.
Duke Nukem 3D was one of the last broadly popular software-rendered 3D first person shooters before games that demanded hardware-based 3D graphics acceleration dominated the scene. It’s a bloody action game featuring a buff, blond, crew-cutted hero in the title role, a one-man army on a mission to rebuff the advances of an alien invasion. Duke Nukem 3D is rude and ribald, filled with scantily clad females and one-liners culled from popular action movies and cult hits alike.
On his Web page, Gordon notes that the installer available for download will use the data files from the “Atomic Edition” CD-ROM released for the PC, or the MacSoft version. If you don’t have either copy, the installer will give you the free shareware episode. Long out of print for the Mac, Duke Nukem 3D is still available for sale from its original developer’s Web site — 3DRealms. More information is available from Gordon’s Web page. Gordon also explains that the download that’s now available replaces an earlier version that was prone to crashing and works properly with the French language release of MacSoft’s disc. Other comments and notes abound, so read carefully before downloading.