The Duke Nukem 3D Screen Saver & Entertainment Pack was published by FormGen in 1996. It was sold as a standalone box, but it is included in the "goodies" folder as part of any standard installation of Duke Nukem 3D: Atomic Edition. It has also been included as part of various expansion packs and compilations. However, the boxed version is considered a rare collector's item and has been valued in hundreds of US dollars.
Contents
All content borrows in-game assets from Duke Nukem 3D. According to the back cover of the box, the pack includes:
- 5 animated screen savers
- "Body Parts" showers the user's desktop with enemy corpses from the game
- "Carnage Meter" displays an EDF news feed, with statistics on the havoc caused by Duke Nukem
- "Exploding Stuff" slowly spawns exploding items all over the user's desktop, covering it in black ash
- "Desktop Rampage" spawns enemies to blast their weapons at the user's desktop, covering it in black ash
- "Shooting Gallery" shows a first-person view of Duke firing his weapon at enemies and objects on the desktop
- 25 wallpaper images
- 16 interactive jigsaw puzzles
- 25 sound clips for customizing your desktop theme
- 16 MIDI music tracks from the game
- 50 in-game screenshots that can be made into more desktop wallpapers or a slideshow screen saver
- Optional password protection module that requires a password before exiting the screen saver
- "Hilarious titallating (sic) surprises, just like in the game. Includes a bypass option for parental control."
- Compatibility with the built-in Windows theme customization utility
How to extract the contents
The disc does not run well on most modern computers. However, changing the EXE file to a ZIP file allows one to easily extract the contents.
Beta MIDI tracks
Of the 16 MIDI tracks included on the disc, only Grabbag and Stalker are identical to the versions packaged with the commercial game. The remaining 14 tracks are earlier drafts that differ from those in the final game:
- DETHTOLL.MID
- FATCMDR.MID
- FUTURMIL.MID
- GLOOMY.MID
- GUTWRNCH.MID
- INTENTS.MID
- INVADER.MID
- NAMES.MID
- SNAKE1.MID
- STORMNU.MID
- STREETS.MID
- SUBWAY1.MID
- THECALL.MID
- WATRWLD1.MID
High-resolution renders
The boxed version is particularly noteworthy for featuring artwork on the back cover of the box that contains three enemy designs from early prototypes of Duke Nukem 3D. Importantly, all of these designs on the back cover appear to be high-resolution 3D renders, as was sometimes created for magazines (e.g., Issue 65 of Nintendo Magazine), so they may exhibit differences from their 2D counterparts due to slightly different photographic angles or changes that are made in post-processing.
First, a 3D render of the Enforcer wearing red armor can be found near the center of the back cover. However, this design was already well-known from numerous promotional screenshots from the May 1995 prototype. A version even appeared in early prints of the official manual that were included inside the box with commercial sales of Duke Nukem 3D.
Pig Cop on the back cover
Second, a Pig Cop in the bottom-left corner has the word "POLICE" printed on the back of its uniform, instead of "L.A.R.D." The earliest known images of the Pig Cop (such as this one) have "L.A.R.D." printed on the backs of their uniforms, with "POLICE" only printed on the fronts. This is the only known instance of the censored design. It suggests 3D Realms may have at one time considered censoring the Pig Cop but ultimately decided against it.
Third and most well known, an unused alternate design for the Assault Trooper can be found in the bottom-right corner. To date, there are no other known images of this enemy that predate the 2016 release of Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World Tour, when the design was repurposed to create the Firefly Trooper.
High-resolution photograph of the alternate Assault Trooper design on the back cover
This design slightly differs from the one seen in World Tour. There are a few reasons for this. First, it is known that the World Tour developers made manual edits to the beta sprites when creating the Firefly Trooper. Second, as mentioned above, the image on the back cover is not a sprite at all; it has many subtler details that are consistent with a high-resolution 3D render, likely captured at a slightly different photographic angle. For that reason, it may also be missing details that were added to the sprite in post-processing.
Video
Duke Nukem 3D Screen Saver and Entertainment Pack - Demonstration