A prototype build of Duke Nukem D-Day has appeared online, giving players the chance to check out a lost piece of the series's history (thanks Vinícius Medeiros for the spot!).
Duke Nukem D-Day was in development at n-Space and was set to be the third Duke Nukem game from the studio, following the PlayStation titles Duke Nukem: Time to Kill and Duke Nukem: The Land of the Babes.
It would have seen Duke travelling back through time to World War 2, where, according to the Apogee and the 3D Realms co-founder Scott Miller, he would have reportedly played a role in key events such as the sinking of the Bismarck and the D-Day landings.
The game was announced in 2000 and was set to be released in the year 2001, with Rockstar Games reportedly attached to publish (Rockstar staff also interestingly worked with Torus on Duke Nukem Advance's development despite the game eventually being published under Rockstar's parent company Take-Two).
By December 2001, however, there were serious doubts about Duke Nukem D-Day ever seeing the light of day, with the Official U.S. PlayStation magazine reporting at the time that n-Space was experiencing "serious financial troubles" causing development on the game to grind to a halt.
As a result, the magazine said that Rockstar had instead decided to port the then-upcoming Duke Nukem Forever from PC to the next-gen Sony platform (before that project also entered development). This was apparently to give n-Space time to get its affairs in order. But it seems like the project was then quietly cancelled, without much fanfare.
Back in October 2024, Apogee and 3D Realms founder Scott Miller claimed "an industry insider friend" had let him know that a build of the game had been recovered, posting a screenshot of the game running in the popular PS2 emulator PCSX2. But, as far as we're aware, this build was never publicly shared.
Earlier this month, though, it appears that a random user has now posted a build of the game from 2001 on Archive.org from June 2001, containing 12 of the game levels. It's not exactly clear whether this is the same build Miller was previously made aware of.
Here's the link to the Archive.org page.