10 Forgotten Sci-Fi Video Games You Need To Play
2. MDK - Shiny Entertainment (1997)
MDK is one of those games that you may not even think you remember until you happen upon a pic of the box art. That xenomorph-looking oddity on the cover, surrounded by rolling clouds of flame is simply burned into the subconscious of anyone who happened to visit the electronics section of just about any store in the late 1990s.
MDK tells the story of Kurt Hectic, a janitor who reluctantly must attempt to save Earth from an alien invasion of gigantic strip mining city-sized vehicles called "Minecrawlers".
That's no xenomorph on the cover, but rather janitor Kurt's superpowered exo-suit, and accompanying him on his quest are his wacko Dr. Fluke Hawkins, and a robotic two-legged/four-armed dog named Bones.
MDK is mostly a run-and-gun third-person shooter but it spices things up with a variety of minigames, and allows the player to enter first-person mode at any time to target with their sniper weapon. It also boasted some puzzling and even a snowboarding level for the extreme sports aficionados of the era.
As crazy as it sounds now, MDK was bleeding edge stuff at the time, requiring a 60 MHz Pentium processor, 16MB of RAM, and 17MB of hard drive storage.
It managed to get a sequel and very nearly earned an animated series back in 98 despite the fact that the meaning of the titular acronym was never revealed.