A selection of images from Duality, a cancelled early 3D FPS by Double Aught (the creators of Marathon Infinity and its endlessly complicated storyline) being developed in the late ‘90s, using their own engine, for Mac OS and PC.

Duality is a completely original, true 3D action game built on Double Aught’s proprietary engine. Double Aught is a small company that split off from Bungie after completing Marathon II. Duality takes place on a distant planet, far in the future.

Duality’s world is harsh - in many ways. The planet’s axis points at the sun, so that one side is a perpetually baked desert, while the other is all darkness and ice. The narrow band at the equator is the only liveable area. The human society on Duality is equally divided - at the top are the aristocrats and the Factors, a priesthood that controls the last remnants of ancient technology left on the planet, while at the bottom are the common people and the Polys, a class defined by physical deformity and doomed to the hardest labour. Deep within the planet’s caves, and under the glaciers and deserts at the poles, wait the Builders - a sentient race laid low by a supernatural enemy many thousands of years ago. Slowly, they - and their enemy - have been reawakening.

The player is thrown into the midst of this world, with few clues to where he comes from or what he is. The player must fight well and think carefully in order to survive, and as more and more of the game world descends into civil war and chaos, the player’s fight for survival becomes a fight to save humanity - and the Builders - from destruction.

The only piece of this world to eventually get public release - outside of screenshots and the occasional soundtrack snippet - is this short story hidden deep within the depths of Marathon Infinity, set in an early version of the Duality universe.

It’s not known if any playable pieces of Duality still exist anywhere - it has been suggested (only half-jokingly) that all development materials currently reside in a lead-lined box at the bottom of the ocean, alongside the Marathon II for Windows 95 source code…

Something that is self evident in screenshots of early 3D FPS games that is often lost in modern "Boomer Shooters" is just how much the level designers clearly loved the new found freedom true 3D offered them.

Look at all the curved architecture that's in every screenshot for this game! Marvel at the pointless filigree, the caves made from subtractive/carved brushes, the verticality and sheer sense of scale that oozes from every pore and pixel that exists of this game. A lot of these screens exude strong 90s Quake mod energy, too, which makes this game's demise hit me that much harder.

This sort of "playground" approach to 3D level design extended to more genres than FPS games, but it's evident in nearly every 3D FPS from 1995 up to about 2002 or 2003 or so, and it's an aesthetic and attitude that desperately needs to be stolen and expanded upon.

Unreleased First Full-3D Game From the Mid 1990s is definitely a vibe

See also: Prey 1995

Back when FPSes (particularly polygonal ones) were new, game designers were faced with a real problem of scale. It wasn't always an issue - Duke Nuke Them Three Dimensional did okay at rendering a convincing, realistic world for instance - but in other cases they came up with some pretty odd decisions, when taken as a whole. One example is the truly space-shuttlian velocity of Doomguy, but I didn't really notice that until it was pointed out to me in the 2010s. Personally however, I always found Jedi Knight's maps to be a great example of an artform in its infancy

making a game set in an earthlike context is relatively easy. If you scale a doorway to the height of the player camera, then make its width proportional, you're most of the way there. but what does Space look like?

We didn't really get great looks at a lot of the environments in the star war. Certainly we saw some enormous areas inside the spacecrafts, but how many of them were particularly detailed, such that we could come up with a good idea of their layout? And sometimes we saw things like gigantic blast doors that seemed disproportionately large compared to the characters, but what were those used for?

The Dark Forces series is possibly the first Star Wars license property that permitted someone to really examine a part of the canon universe from all angles with a critical eye. It required players to spend dozens of hours in places that the movies only portrayed for minutes, and whose contents had - without question - never really been fully nailed down beyond what was needed to make a pleasing picture on screen.

I can only speculate on what it was like to create this game, but it's probably safe to assume that - as was quite common in those days, especially for license titles - the developers were given the license, told they had X months to make a game, then fully excommunicated by the rightsholder. It was made by Lucasarts, but I don't know how much pull they actually had with Lucas film.

It's very possible that the level designers for this game were told "create 30 hours of fully 3D content set in the Star Wars universe, constantly presenting players with new things to do, including functioning machinery and puzzles in environments that make diegetic sense," and had to figure out what all of that meant through sheer personal imagination, by watching the movies and then just brainstorming.

So, someone probably wrote in a design document "the player emerges from the imperial waste management building into an outflow channel", and a level designer had to figure out what materials that was made out of, what volume of waste the attached base was producing, and what would make for a fun level given the scale of the weapons and movement tech they had already offered the player, and had absolutely nobody to compare notes with to find out if any of their conclusions made sense.

The end result is a game full of two kinds of things:

A) tiny, surprisingly detailed rooms of unclear purpose, buried inside unfathomably complex industrial warrens

B) vast, yawning chasms, covered in visibly repeating textures, often absolutely devoid of life, which the player is stuck in long enough for the feeling of being far from any recognizable civilization to sink in

At times, Jedi Knight feels like a game about falling into the intake chute of a hydroelectric dam and trying to find your way out

the addon level artisans really turned into wizards since the launch of this ol bird in '97. Wild to think about.

With regards to duality, this feels like a pretty great opportunity for a rascally band of heroes to find the writer & any remaining devs and revive this. now is the era of lost legends.

With regards to duality, this feels like a pretty great opportunity for a rascally band of heroes to find the writer & any remaining devs and revive this. now is the era of lost legends.

This probably isn't a popular opinion among the nostalgic and romantic, but I'm less interested in reboots and resurrections (as cool as they may be) than I am in shambling new monstrosities assembled from the bones of multiple precursors, both released and failed.

Corpses like Prey '98 and Duality are fertile inspiration for modern low-poly 3D artists with infinitely superior tooling and a proclivity towards manshoots, but if the Drakengard series taught us all anything, it's that resurrecting the dead is an incredibly bad fucking idea.

i can't fix them and i think it's funny