Stuart Hunt talks to ex-Shiny boss David Perry, on his genre defying 1997 classic MDK

However it is you view the two ‘proper’ Earthworm Jim games, you could never argue that their irreverence, humour and bawdy cartoon look provided a timeless summation of what was so endearing about videogames of the Nineties.

MDK was creator David Perry’s first foray into 3D gaming, a hesitant jump that would draw a faint line in the sand, showing when it was that videogames decided to get all burnished and real-looking. MDK isn’t to be blamed or praised for spearheading this particular shift in gaming though; the Pentium processor was the catalyst – David Perry and his talented troupe simply proved that the shift could be bridged brilliantly. The story of an unlikely hero supplanted into a power-giving suit, with more of that iconic Shiny imagery and certainly no shortage of that trademark Shiny humour, MDK would share more in common with a two-dimensional annelid than any fancy free-roaming polygon game series released after it.

A high expectancy to deliver something to equal the popularity of Earthworm Jim was never going to be an easy task. After all Jim, by that time, had amassed himself a toy line, a Marvel comic, an animated television series and even had a big Hollywood Studio interested in turning his life story into a motion picture. The earthworm had segued from popular videogame to very profitable brand name.

Behind the scenes David Perry had amassed the best 2D development team in the industry and devised a clever method to generate smoother animation from the Mega Drive. The result of this ‘compression system’, as it was known, would allow his team to harness more frames of animation than other developers coding for the machine at that time.

“It kind of gave us an edge, allowing our artists to go that little bit further than people would normally be able to go at that time,” explains David. “To solve that programming problem was actually pretty complicated because we were doing it by hand, so I had a guy come in and write a tool that would enable us to convert the data from the artist to the way that I needed it compressed. Basically, then the team could just make as many frames of animation as they needed because it was all on very compressed data. This gave us that smooth look that you wouldn’t have seen in any other game. That was one of our secrets at the time.”

“Another technique we used was to have the animators reuse animation frames, which is actually a technique that real animators will use,” he continues. “This was also beneficial as it allowed our games to feel even smoother as there were extra frames of animation inside them that didn’t take up any memory.”

It now becomes clearer as to why it was David became anxious when his team wanted to go 3D. This unique technique that Shiny had developed would prove useless to them in 3D realms. Taking that inevitable leap would be like David driving a hatchet into his leading arm and forcing himself to paint with the other, but that day would have to come eventually.

“Before MDK’s development there were a few people experimenting with 3D graphics, and it was obvious to me that we could stick our head in the sand each year or we were going to have to go 3D,” admits David. “I was worried because the guys I had were some of the best 2D guys in the business, I was extremely proud of my team because of what they had achieved in the 2D world.”

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