Okay, right now I think everything that can be said about the return of Duke Nukem has been said. Well, ALMOST everything, since there is a point I've been waiting for someone a bit more influential in the geek media to get around to, but oddly enough nobody out there seems to want to touch it, or is more or less unaware of it.
Plenty has been said about Duke's bombastic attitude... and how an incredibly arrogant hero who is actually as good as he thinks he is is a style of humor certain people don't care for, or just don't "get". However I think a point about the enduring success of the character, and why we'll probably see another purely "this generation" game involving the character with the same attitude come to be.
That is to say that Duke Nukem is popular with the ladies. I don't mean this in the sense of his game persona, but with real world women, it seems to be something that few people have noticed or want to notice.
Understand that in today's "Scott Pilgrim" generation, the whole storyline of the sensitive geekboy who lands the girl by showing how much better he is for her than the macho jerks she usually goes with is popular in all of it's incarnations. It's been a story recycled for decades, but we see more of this nowadays than ever before. A type of story that is popular specifically because of the trend for girls to go with those "macho jerks" which geeks notice and resent in real life. One differance between this "generation" and previous ones is largely that previously escapism involved your typical nerd stepping into the shoes of a macho jerk type as a sort of wish fulfillment fantasy. Basically you become the macho man in the game. Today however we see a lot more heroes who are themselves nerds, who manage to be that self-proclaimed "sensitive geek boy" while still being very tough and capable of doing all the action stuff themselves... a stereotype which doesn't generally exist in real life for the most part, but does in games and fiction and can be accepted because it represents a wish fulfillment for nerds that seems more obtainable than say being a macho man.
The thing is that Duke himself is pretty much the perfect guy for a lot of girls. He's got the perfectly chiseled face, the big muscles, the aryan "stud god" hair, and the whole nine yards, as well as that whole arrogant bad boy attitude that women gobble up, whether we see it as being good for them or not. Duke *IS* a macho jerk, but he also generally treats women fairly well despite the sexism (and actual sex), protecting and rescueing them against overwhelming odds. Basically Duke Nukem, whose personality is criticized, IS the macho jerk the current nerds want to see as the bad guy, exactly the kind of guy that was turned into a villain for movies like "Scott Pilgrim".
The thing is though that you'll notice that girls tend to be fairly close lipped about guys they find attractive in fiction, or just in general, at least to guys. For example most women will tell you that they don't find Fabio attractive (and think about that name and his arrogance in general... ) yet his career in selling TONS of romance novels, and butter substitutes to middle aged housewives pretty much speaks for itself. The same can be said of the Chippendales, women will generally say "oh I don't find that hawt" yet you see all stripes of women going to those shows (they pack the house when they performed at the casinos where I worked), and that's simply a bunch of macho men with big muscles up there flexing around and having an attitude.
Duke Nukem might not represent mister "I want to settle down and marry this guy" but he does represent the feminine sex fantasy, especially given his "no strings attached" attitude and the fact that he's not liable to get all that possesive unlike a lot of other macho guys who oftentimes start to view women literally as their property. Basically he's a guy that a girl could have fun with, and then in all likelyhood find someone else.
Now, at this point some people are probably seething and going "okay Therumancer, but how do you know women find Duke Nukem attractive", and "I'm a girl and I don't think he's hot" (which might be true, but we're talking in general, and again I don't expect girls to admit when they find a guy to be a sex god anyway, it's just the way things are). The answer to this is quite simple... observation.
At the game stores near where I live they had promotional gimmicks like cut outs of Duke and his girlfriend you could stick your head into, and I saw a LOT of girls doing that, where guys (like usual for that gimmick) seemed far less interested in the whole thing. Not to mention I notice a surprising number of girls in various MMO chat channels, and just in general, talking about how they play the game. Rarely do I hear many of them going "OMG, I hate Duke Nukem" that's the guys, though there is the general excuse that "well I didn't buy this, but I'm playing my boyfriend's copy", but that applies to a lot of similar things.
To a lot of the nerds looking at this game, I think there is a tendency for us to want to think the game is appealing largely to ill adjusted 12 year olds. I think people are totally overlooking how many girls play this game, and even how the marketing, things like those cut outs for example, are directed at women more than we probably want to admit.
Everyone likes to look at Duke Nukem from a male nerd-centric perspective, but nobody has bothered to look at him in the context of a sex symbol for women, comparing him to other sex symbols with very similar looks and attitudes. On a lot of levels Duke Nukem is Fabio with short hair and a gun. He has the opposite kind of appeal to women that is found in say "Twilight" but it's STILL a kind of appeal, very powerful, and something we've seen in marketing before.
These are my thoughts and observations, and really I think this is a piece of the puzzle that is missing from most commentary on the subject.
