The Earthworm Jim games were perhaps the earliest indication that I’d wind up in this career. They were the first time that I really became aware of the developers behind the games I played, and beyond that, I actually contacted one of them – via snail mail.
I was probably 7 at the time, and I wrote to Shiny Entertainment asking them if they were going to make an Earthworm Jim 2. Amazingly, they wrote back. Not just some pre-formatted response, either. They actually answered my questions. I wish I still had that letter.
After Earthworm Jim 2, Shiny adopted a no-sequel policy. Earthworm Jim 3D wasn’t developed by Shiny, and as an N64 owner, I wouldn’t play another game by the developer until 2003’s Enter the Matrix. At that point, Shiny had been sold to Infogrames, and their last years of existence were spent making licensed games.
But following the release of Earthworm Jim 2 and before Enter the Matrix, they created a small handful of games that still demonstrated the developer’s ingenuity. And they began with 1997’s MDK.
On a good day, 2.5 billion people will die
Before you ask, the meaning of MDK as an acronym isn’t really mentioned anywhere in the story or marketing. For a long time, it was believed to mean “Murder Death Kill,” but this wasn’t confirmed until creator Nick Bruty stepped in and confirmed it. However, according to Bruty, “It was a temp name that stuck although I didn’t like the actual meaning so we came up with a bunch of other names to cover it up.”
I can understand not really loving the name. The ‘90s saw a lot of games that glorified graphic violence, and the name “Murder Death Kill” kind of suggests it’s one of them. There’s violence, sure, but it’s not really graphic.
There isn’t much story told within MDK itself. Starting out, your only point of context is that a “Huge City Minecrawler” is headed toward Laguna Beach. You start the game free-falling toward it, and then you’re blasting everything in sight.
The instruction manual is where it’s at, giving you a completely unhinged account of what’s going on. Dr. Fluke Hawkins gets mocked by the scientific community, so he kidnaps his janitor and goes into space to try and get proof that he’s not crazy. As it turns out, he is crazy, but rather than return to Earth, he decides to stay in space until he makes a real discovery. Eventually, Earth is invaded, and being in space at the time, Dr. Hawkins decides that he’s the planet’s only hope. So, he sends his janitor to clean up this mess.
Tourism is safe
You play as this janitor, Kurt Hectic. The good doctor has provided Kurt with the “Coil Suit,” which is a formfitting little number with a chaingun on one arm and a face-mounted sniper rifle. After the aforementioned free-fall onto the minecrawler, your job is to gun your way to the pilot’s seat and eliminate whoever’s driving it, at which point you’ll be sucked back into space.
There are six levels, but the last level feels more like an epilogue to level five. Each one is a sprint through a variety of open environments that usually feature combat and a light puzzle. The puzzles range from simply destroying a lock with the “World’s Smallest Nuclear Explosion” to “where the hell am I supposed to go?” levels of obtuse. It’s not too difficult. Normally I was able to figure out where the hell I was supposed to go by shooting everything and, if that didn’t work, jumping on everything.
You’re given a handful of secondary weapons along the way, either devices or alternate ammunition for the sniper rifle. The sniper rifle ammo sucks to cycle through. Usually, I just want to use the standard bullet, but if you picked up, say, a mortar round along the way, it gets loaded over top, and I end up just embarrassing myself.
While the majority of MDK is just running and gunning, it does mix things up with platforming and short vehicle sections. The runtime is pretty short at about 4 hours, but it at least keeps things interesting the whole way through.
I feel top!
I first played MDK around my college years. At that point, the third and first-person shooter genres were deep in their brown realism phase. Playing this game was a welcome change from carrying two guns and gluing my back to cover.
Kurt’s chain gun is pretty weak, but it sprays at a ridiculously fast speed. He can run at about 60MPH, and the open environments were impressive during an era largely confined to corridors. More impressive was that, even though this was 1997, there wasn’t any fog occluding distant objects.
The trade-off is that the environments also aren’t very detailed, but that is hardly ever a problem. Usually, it only causes issues during platforming sections. However, this is exacerbated by the fact that Kurt is just a 2D sprite. He can actually cling to ledges and pull himself up, but figuring out where the ledge is in relation to Kurt can be difficult.
MDK was released during the early days of 3D acceleration on PC, which I now hate. I don’t hate the games, really, but I do hate how badly they tend to play on modern setups. Interplay did recently patch it to improve compatibility, but it still very reluctantly runs at 640×480 resolution. Proper mouse aiming needs to be configured in the game’s settings, and the menus don’t really function correctly. One time, I alt-tabbed, and when I went back in, my mouse aim was broken. It’s a game that badly needs a source port or remaster.
Face mounted hardware
MDK also contains a lot of Shiny’s original weirdness. There are cows, for example. It’s largely a mix of dark and absurd humor. Earthworm Jim even makes a cameo appearance as a power-up icon that causes a cow to land on enemies.
There was a sequel appropriately named MDK 2, but it was handled by BioWare. It was generally well-received and well-loved, even getting an HD version in 2012. However, it was a disappointment to me. The gameplay alternates between three characters: Dr. Hawkins, Kurt, and Max. Kurt’s levels are rather similar to the first game, but Dr. Hawkin’s had more puzzle-oriented gameplay. I barely remember what Max played like. The biggest letdown for me was the fact that the humor leaned in more of a silly direction, losing its edge.
The original MDK is just dumb fun. But beyond that, it’s also an imaginative antithesis to the direction shooting games would take over the next decade. Even now, I can’t think of a game that comes close to MDK’s speedy, cathartic blasting mixed with a darkly surreal atmosphere. Shiny Entertainment’s games weren’t always the tightest, most polished experience on the market, but the world is poorer for the loss of that company’s unique perspective. There hasn’t been anything quite like them since.
For other retro titles you may have missed, click right here!
Published: Dec 15, 2023 05:00 pm