Duke Nukem must've been one of the first platform games I played. I can still remember I only had a monochrome screen back then, it was amazing when I finally saw how it looked in color :-)

Absolutely. I have a copy of Shrapnel City lying around somewhere.

nope, never saw 'em. where can I get a copy?

The first episodes of Duke 1 and 2 are both shareware, which means that anyone who has the game is free can give away or sell copies to anyone as long as the copies are unmodified (but remember that only episode 1 of each game is shareware), so those should be easy to find on the internet, but you might as well get them straight from the 3D Realms website.
http://www.3drealms.com/duke1/
http://www.3drealms.com/duke2/
You can also buy the complete games with all episodes from 3D Realms. Duke 1 (3 episodes) and Duke 2 (4 episodes) each go for $10.

Heh, there's a reason why the first two games aren't mentioned, they were just bog standard platformers of the day.

what about manhattan project? is that any good? I notice it's third person..

Duke Nukem 3D was certainly revolutionary, but I thought it was Future Shock that first had mouse-look. This Wikipedia article seems to agree (somewhat).

But even I could edit Wikipedia to say that Halo was the first mouse look game, evar, and that it ran on a NES..

I never played it but a friend said it was just your basic run & gun game with nothing to make it stand out from the crowd.
Future Shock wasn't released until May '96 (according to several websites) while Duke 3D was released in January '96, 4 months earlier.
Wiki is only as good as the people who supply the information, in this case it's totally incorrect.

I want the Duke Nukem 2D side scrollers, for 2D games back in the day when i played them on shareware, they were viceral!

Manhattan Project is actually a platformer. Quite good, but nothing over being decent.

IT IS HEEEEEEEERE!

Nice bump matey.

I also thought Future Shock was the first game with mouselook. Maybe it was just the first one with it turned on by default ;-) I definitely remember it as a feature from Future Shock, but not from Duke3d... maybe i didn't use it back then.
Looking into it i've just gotten more confused. Lots of places list Future Shock's release as 1995. But some say 1996. Maybe it was a regional variation?
There are also lots of sources that claim FS had the first mouselook. I'm wondering if Duke3D mouselook was patched in later? Or maybe it isn't counted as real mouselook as its only a 2.5D engine and its vertical motion was limited.
Or maybe the shareware vs retail releases are causing the confusion.
Either way, marathon was probably the first mouslook game... and futureshock the first real 3d mouselook game. though i'm wondering if Descent doesn't deserve that... didn't it have mouse controls??