work specifically to accommodate the elements of the game which the designers and artists wished to achieve. Sniper mode was a major part of the game, with the ability to zoom up to 100x. The team decided not to employ any of the usual techniques to limit pop-up, such as clipping and fogging. A major technical issue was the frame rate. Shiny felt most PC games maintained frame rate by using big pixels in low resolution, which works as long as the game is not running SVGA mode. Based on their experiences developing for consoles, they wanted to take a different approach; using small pixels in high resolution. They set a target of maintaining a constant frame rate of at least 30fps at all times on all machines, and so they play-tested the game multiple times. When the frame rate dropped below 30, they either removed something from that part of the game, rewrote the graphics code, or altered the artwork until they could get the frame rate back up to where they wanted without having to reduce resolution or increase pixel size. According to Bruty, "We had no idea how fast we could get the engine when we started. The game would run too slow if we textured everything, so some parts were just flat-shaded for speed. We did our best to make that look like a design choice, or shadows, but it was a tricky balance." When the game debuted at the 1996 E3 event in April, producer David Perry emphasized that he felt Shiny's lack of experience on the PC was to their advantage; "instead of simply rewriting a game that's already been written and having to meet a set of expectations, we can shoot really high." MDK was designed at a time when 3D gaming was becoming popular, but GPUs hadn't had much impact on game development, and as such, "graphics would be designed to operate in software." Ultimately, the initial release of the game relied wholly on software rendering, without any additional GPU requirements. The game's original system requirements were a 60 MHz Pentium (although 90 MHz was recommended), 16MB of RAM, 17MB of hard drive storage for basic installation (37MB for full installation), an SVGA compatible video card, and a Sound Blaster or equivalent sound card; basic specs for the time. However, patches were later released that added support for then-popular 3D APIs. Mac