Duke Nukem

I was never much of a gamer, even to this day. (With one major exception.) Back during the advent and widespread availability of the PC, say the early 90s, I used mine (running Windows 3.1) mainly for

- school reports and projects (remember WYSIWYG?)
- research (astronomy, physics, and history, such as the French Revolution)
- social networking (I guess; remember Prodigy?)

But not so much games. Until I hooked up with my long-lost high school pal Bob.

Bob was a gamer, and his first task was to get me a new machine with an up-to-date OS. We went to one of those computer conventions and bought a PC piecemeal for $1400, a bargain back in those days. A mutual acquaintance built the whole thing for me, configured it and set it up, got me online access, over the course of two hours. Then Bob loaded Quake and Duke Nukem on it. We drove back to my apartment and hooked everything up.

And I became hooked that summer.

I guess it was 96 or 97. Not sure. But I spent an inordinate amount of time playing those two games. I mean, hours. Over the weekend I would literally be up all night playing them, going to bed as dawn lightened the skies and the birds started their yapping. I’d wake up in the afternoon and resume my saved games. I would beat the game, then start all over. I would play a level and thoroughly search every nook and cranny for secret passageways. I would discover the quickest, most efficient way to dominate a level. Then I’d do speed runs where I tried to kill everything and get all my objectives obtained in the shortest amount of time.

After a month or two I grew bored and I bought Star Wars Dark Forces. Then it was rinse, wash, repeat, ad infinitum, for another month or two. By the end of the summer I bought Microsoft Flight Simulator (with joystick), Quake II, You Don’t Know Jack, Voyetra Music Write, and, later, Half-Life. For either my birthday or Christmas the family gave me Extreme Chess and Microsoft Links. I was still working full-time, having finished night school the year before, but now my evenings and weekends were completely full.

Then, I got a girlfriend. The future Mrs. Hopper.

Suddenly, I stopped the games, cold turkey. I banged out the first draft of my first novel the first seven months of 1999. A year later we relocated down to Maryland where I got a job doing IT support. The internet was in full blossom, and I spent any free time – which was a fraction of what it was a few years prior – exploring the web and tinkering with the inner workings of Windows and Dell computers.

The only game I really played in the past decade was Freecell, and that only on the rare occasions I was dueling with writer’s block.

A few days ago I saw an online ad for MS-DOS games and clicked on it – and guess what? You can now download and play Quake and Duke Nukem for free! Games that took up half of my hard drive now take up something like half a percent. Downloads that used to take an hour take 45 seconds. I tried downloading both; however, I was only able to get Duke Nukem to open to play.

I simply cannot adequately describe the wave of nostalgia that flooded over me! The layout of these worlds, long forgotten, were now suddenly yanked up into my consciousness. I was kinda uncoordinated at first, but after ten minutes the keyboard controls were again second nature. For two hours straight I played up to the third levels of LA Meltdown, Shrapnel City, and Lunar Apocalypse. (I wasted a lot of time trying to recall where secrets were, where bad guys were hiding, where switches that opened doors were, etc.) It was quite an enjoyable time: time flew by incredibly fast and I forgot all my worries and troubles.

A troubling thought nagged me from the start, though. What if I got hooked again? I can’t afford to spend 30-40 hours on this nonsense, not with the girls, their extracurricular activities, the household chores, the job hunt, the writing, the reading. Don’t even have 3-4 hours a week to spend on it.

But you know what? The next day I had absolutely no desire to play. I thought about it from time to time, but didn’t actually find the time to sit down and start playing. The next day I played for about ten minutes, then grew bored. My diagnosis right now is that Duke Nukem holds a ton of nostalgia power, but nostalgia power is not a sustainable driving force, ultimately, in the long run. Nostalgia is a cross between a longing for and a fond reminiscence of the idealized past. And when you bring something from the past into the present, it’s ultimately a dead sort of thing. Better to focus your efforts and energies, your whole being, on the present and what interests you now. Because that will be what you’ll be nostalgic for a year, five, ten, fifteen, or twenty years later.

Now if you’ll excuse me, there are some aliens invading Los Angeles and mankind needs my help ...