Source: PSM – Number 1 – September 1997
MDK is a third person shooter initially developed for the PC and then ported to Mac OS and later the PlayStation. While it was developed at a time when 3D accelerators were starting to take off in popularity, MDK was developed without as hardware based 3D graphics. All rendering was done via software and the requirements were still relatively modest at the time…a Pentium 60 with 16MB of RAM. The graphics were pretty good for the time too.
The game was originally to be called “Murder Death Kill” but was changed for marketing purposes. Even the MDK became more ambiguous as there were a few instances of that acronym in the game. The most obvious of which was the name of the mission being executed which was called “Mission: Deliver Kindness”. The game has a rather humorous backstory though the main plot is pretty simplistic…save the Earth from invading aliens. You must accomplish this, in part, using a newly invented “Coil Suit”.
The PlayStation version of the game was released about 7 months after the original PC version though development overlapped somewhat. Graphically speaking, there are some things better about the PC version and other things better about the PlayStation version. Personally, I prefer the PC version and that’s probably the easiest version to get as it has been released on both Steam and GoG. The PlayStation version shouldn’t be too hard to find but you will have to track down an original. A sequel (MDK2) was released in 2000 for Windows and the Dreamcast and in 2001 for the PlayStation. A third game was planned but never released.
The ad above is for the PlayStation version of the game and it appeared in the September 1997 issue of PSM (the first issue). Screen shots are from the PC version of the game.
