On the bright side, it runs on Windows 7 and Windows 8-in 4K, no less-with little effort. Today, playing Kingpin is like walking across the bridge between Quake II and Soldier of Fortune and saying fuck a lot. It was definitely a step forward for technology-even if the flesh of all the characters pulsates in cutscenes, like worms are writing just under the surface of their skin. The AI was smart for its day, the levels were hub-based slices of city instead of linear missions, and it looked pretty amazing compared to the iD Tech 2 games of just a year or two before. Once you get past the “mature” content of brutal violence and the word “fuck” featuring in every line of dialogue and the drab urban environments, though, there’s something interesting about Kingpin. You beat a lot of people in the head with a lead pipe in the first level until their faces are matted with blood. It’s relentlessly violent in a way that feels more ugly than fun. The first line of dialogue your thick-necked sack of meat utters is “I’m gonna bury those two motherfuckers,” and that pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the game.
Arms and legs would explode into pieces of meat with enough damage.Īnd then there was the cursing. Heads blew off into chunks of flesh, and dead bodies pumped blood onto the dirty concrete. Before Soldier of Fortune stole away the accolade, Kingin’s claim to fame was a lesser, but still impressive, degree of character model dismemberment.
Kingpin ran on the iD Tech 2 engine, but its characters look like the lumpy meatbags of Unreal Engine 3 transported back in time half a decade.
In 1999, the year before Soldier of Fortune famously let you shoot off arms, legs, and blow heads into chunks of brain and gore, there was Kingpin: Life of Crime. This week's expletive-filled Pixel Boost goes out to former PC Gamer editor Norman Chan, who lived the Life of Crime back in '99. Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.
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