[Marphy Black]

With the relatively recent unceremonious deaths of the legacy and archive 3D Realms sites, I thought it prudent to announce an endeavor I've been poking away at for a little while now that aims to combat against more history vanishing.

To start off immediately with the point, the Duke Art Archive may be accessed here: https://drive.google...jFcI9tqqidpV8zK

Long story short: there's a great deal of Duke's always-enchanting artwork that's at risk of becoming lost. A lot of this artwork has been kindly made publicly available before, but this has been spread across many individual artist portfolios, forum posts, digital and disc press kits, tweets, Discord messages, game leaks, magazines and other print media, and so much more across a time span of decades. I can tell you that an astonishing number of these sources are now gone, and there's a significant amount of it that hasn't been archived online in any form whatsoever.

Hence, the goal of the Duke Art Archive is to preserve the artwork from Duke and Duke-adjacent games and notate the sources from which these pieces originated to allow better appreciation of both the art and the artists. The focus for the artwork here is the stuff you wouldn’t normally see while playing the games themselves, or at least not in the greatest quality. This covers cover artwork, promotional artwork and advertisements, logos, development concept art and model renders, and so forth. For a more thorough rundown of what the archive entails and how to use it, check out the README.

As for its current status, there are several clearly marked WIP sections that have only just begun to be populated, but the available Duke folders already contain a majority of the highest quality direct digital versions of the artwork relevant to those titles. I'm now at the point where it's necessary to move on to scanned material since a good deal of artwork has never been released in its raw digital form, hence magazine scans, box covers scans, and so forth are on the horizon. There are several paths forward here, including scanning my own collection to gather the material, but I'm certainly open to community suggestions and contributions in this regard, especially for items that I don't physically own.

All that said, this is very much going to be a continual ongoing project, and it'll grow faster and encompass more content with the assistance of the community at large. If you've located any relevant material, have anything to contribute, got suggestions to make, or whatnot, please don't hesitate to send a message my way.

And finally, I wish to credit the following individuals for making this archive as possible as it currently is (also written and updated in the README):

• Duke Nukem 3D Maps (Lunick)
  
• The Duke Nukem and BUILD Archives (Jimmy)
  
• The Duke Cave
  
• Green
  
• Hendricks
  
• Fox
  
• K100Nukem
  
• Besli
  
• Nacho (Endangered Species collection)
  
• Nico of GameWallpapers.com
  
• The many community members over the years who have identified and preserved forum posts, magazines, portfolios, press kits, and so many other sources which contain these materials

[Besli]

https://x.com/ScottA...938381959376958

AI reconstruted version of this Art:

Attached thumbnail(s)

• 

[Besli]

I tried to do a better reconstruction of this art:


Here is the result:

Attached thumbnail(s)

• 

[Fantinaikos]

Couldn't resist.

[Marphy Black]

Besli, on 10 April 2026 - 03:44 AM, said:

I tried to do a better reconstruction of this art:

Thanks for the contribution, and thank you for having collected many of these images over the years as well. When it comes to restorations done by the community such as these, including ones I've done myself, I haven't yet figured out the best way to integrate them into the archive. I do believe they do deserve a place here since these fan efforts, when executed well and accurately/faithfully, will likely serve as the best quality versions we'll ever have. I'll probably organize them into clearly marked "Fan Restorations" subfolders.

And since this also brings up another topic, when it comes to using AI for these fan restorations, I'll have to be picky when it comes to their quality since unchecked AI processes can be overzealous and create undesirable artifacts. In your DNDTI cover image, it's apparent that the AI cleanup also smudged out much intentional detail as well as introduce an odd pattern to the monitor, and some smaller elements were lost in translation like the identifiable Duke 3D reflection is Duke's sunglasses.

[Malgon]

Hey Marphy, I've uploaded a zip file here following the same folder name structure and formatting as the archive with versions of files that I had. It's a mix of some missing files, some higher resolution ones (some are only slightly higher but I thought it was worth putting in the zip file), and some alternates with slight variations. I was fairly careful to follow the readme and not include something that already existed or was of no real value but there are some goodies I think people will be happy to see (eg. Endangered Species higher resolution). There's an info.txt in each of the main folders giving brief explanations to why the files were included and helpful notes to hopefully(!) be of some help in streamlining the process and saving time when comparing versions (if it's decided to incorporate them into the archive of course ).

Anyway, it probably took me roughly several hours after downloading the archive yesterday and comparing with my files and uploading what I had, but it was worth it. Any questions, or issues downloading the zip file, then let me know and I'll get it sorted.

Edit: Unfortunately I didn't have any source attributions for the files as some of these were collected all the way back to the 3D Realms forum days. For reference, the zip should contain 126 files.

[Besli]

Yeah, I understand what you mean.

Here is another Duke Caribbean Logo:


And some cover scans:


French cover (with extra blood on boot):

[Besli]

Duke it out in D.C. logo:


Cover:



French: Duke à Washington
https://i.ebayimg.co...PD/s-l1600.webp

[Besli]

Duke Nuclear Winter logo:


Cover:


Art (from old 3D Realms site):

Attached thumbnail(s)

• 

[unedukecated]

@ Besli: cool, nice clean logos! I remember buying "Life's a Beach" in Summer 1998 in London since it was like impossible to get that in Germany without the help of an adult (cringe) due to it all was banned here back then. In hindsight it's ridiculous indeed, and the bans were all lifted years later - at least most of it I think.

Edit: still might have the box somewhere too. Among some other stuff like a really thick level design book for Doom and similar.

[Marphy Black]

Malgon, on 23 April 2026 - 01:07 AM, said:

Hey Marphy, I've uploaded a zip file here following the same folder name structure and formatting as the archive with versions of files that I had.

Thanks! I've now incorporated a majority of these files to the archive. I did exclude some images which you noted as being redundant, AI upscales, and so forth, but going through all of your files also allowed me to catch a few oversights I made when originally setting up some folders, so this submission has been of great value.

Besli, on 25 April 2026 - 11:12 AM, said:

Duke expansion stuff

Also thanks! Checking where your images are hosted, I see efforts for isolating and improving logos are already occurring on places like SteamGridDB and the LaunchBox forums. I'll be sure to take a closer look at what's already here to start filling out the new Fan Restoration directories on the archive.

And as a side note, both of you have submitted cover scans. Most are suitable for the archive, but I haven't pulled the trigger on uploading them just yet as I'm still in the process of organizing this material. Your contributions are already noted, nonetheless, so much appreciation to each of you.

Anywho, as a tangent to the art archive, a side endeavor I've been carrying out alongside preserving this art is attempting to identify the actual artists behind the most prominent cover and promotional artwork. You'd think this'd be pretty straightforward, but alas! Like the art itself, this artist information has been scattered all over the net across decades, and even while specifically seeking out these attributions, it's surprising to see some authors are as-of-yet unknown (at least based on my research so far). If you would like to help identify the unknown, I invite you to take a gander at my Known Artist Credits document which catalogs and sources the names I've tracked down: https://docs.google....We8z2vFpBqaM5E/

[Malgon]

Thanks Marphy, glad I was able to contribute. Also, it was funny when I'd recently been digging through a lot of old threads here and discovered that some of the missing files I had were ones you had shared originally! It was nice to see Besli had shared some superior quality boxart for the expansions than what I had as well. Really cool stuff.

[Besli]

I had this highres BLOOD Logo from somewhere.

Attached thumbnail(s)

• 

[Besli]

And made this UHD Version with Gemini.

Attached thumbnail(s)

• 

[Besli]

Here is another source:

https://www.tumblr.c...models-by-kevin
(Don't miss to click the Source link there!)

Artist:
https://kevinkilstrom.weebly.com/

[Besli]

Did you have this one?

https://static.wikia...&path-prefix=ru

[Marphy Black]

Besli, on 04 July 2026 - 09:48 AM, said:

I had this highres BLOOD Logo from somewhere.

Blood's gargoyle plaque art is a peculiar case since evidence suggests the 600px wide version is the native resolution of this piece. This is the resolution of the lossless version included in Refreshed Supply's vault, and while there are a handful of egregious errors in this vault that call into question its reliability, it's the same resolution as the version uploaded by Kevin Kilstrom himself to his Instagram account, and he seems to have the source art of his own work. This is odd since this art was also used on the cover of some European releases, and you'd figure Monolith would want high resolution art for this purposes. I wish I could verify if these physical releases appear to indeed feature a higher resolution version of the gargoyle art, but I don't possess them myself, and the available scans online are pretty crummy.

All this is to say that I don't think there is high res Blood gargoyle plaque artwork out there, and any versions that are floating around are simply fan upscales.

Edit: I found a high resolution scan of the EU Blood box, and it really does look like they blew up the 600px image for the cover, blurring and all.

Besli, on 11 July 2026 - 03:36 AM, said:

Did you have this one?

https://static.wikia...&path-prefix=ru

I intend to include the rest of the goofy Duke 1 and 2 shareware cover art, but I wanted to take a stab at creating a clean cutout of that cover right now: https://drive.google...h5YCKPgHEb/view

[Marphy Black]

Marphy Black, on 11 July 2026 - 08:18 PM, said:

All this is to say that I don't think there is high res Blood gargoyle plaque artwork out there

As it so happens, Kevin Kilstrom had already corroborated this notion on the Blood Discord:


So Blood's iconic gargoyle plaque logo artwork that we're all familiar with only exists in relatively low resolution form. However, Kilstrom does reveal in this Discord message that he did also make a high resolution recreation for the t-shirts that Monolith once offered online for sale long ago. Unfortunately, it looks like those shirts were the only time this high resolution artwork was used, and doubly unfortunately, outside of the aforementioned tiny archived thumbnails, it seems that there's literally no surviving photographical evidence of even one of these shirts in existence. It's like the shirt-equivalent of lost media. A "lost shirt", you might say.