MDK

aka: Murder Death Kill
Moby ID: 344
Windows Specs
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Description official descriptions

In this 3D shoot 'em up, you play Kurt, and your job is to save the world. Aliens have sent 8 giant fortresses to destroy earth. You run and jump through 6 missions of strange 3D worlds and kill the "Stream Riders" with your machine gun arm. Precise platform jumps are part of the challenge.

Kurt is equipped with a special battle suit with an included parachute and a sniper interface (allowing you to aim precise shooting while standing still) embedded in your helmet. Further weaponry enhancements are available as you progress through the game.

Spellings

  • 亡命暗殺令 - Traditional Chinese spelling
  • 孤胆枪手 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (DOS version)

67 People (39 developers, 28 thanks) · View all

Executive Producer
Producer
Associate Producer
QA Lead
Testing Staff
Sales and Marketing
Marketing Manager
Business Affairs
Sound Design
Original Concept
Designed in equal parts by
Additional Design
Programming & Tools
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 86% (based on 43 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.9 out of 5 (based on 154 ratings with 10 reviews)

Funny,original, epic & just plain awesome!

The Good
M.D.K (stands for murder death kill?? max doctor kurt?? mother's day kiss?? whatever...) was really groundbreaking in it's time back then in 1997. You play as kurt & your job is to terminate the alien bastards out of this world(for saving earth). You have six missions/levels which you will travel & kick some alien ass. Mdk was the first game (at least on the pc) that had a sniper. Boss battles are just awesome & creative . The graphics (for it's time) were unbelievable, you really felt like part of a living world. The atmosphere while post-apocalyptic has a heavy comedic feeling. Also the soundtrack is definitely a plus, it's helping making the game a powerful & epic experience.

The Bad
Well the game was way way way to short-> only 6 missions(at least they are long ones). another problem is the fact the game can get repetitive at times.

The Bottom Line
Great game! very close to a masterpiece( & some may say it is) By far Shiny's best& one of the best gaming experiences ever.

Windows · by BlackNightmare (259) · 2004

A fun, fast shooter that's a breeze to play

The Good
MDK is an almost perfect blend of fun shooter. The emphasis of the game is enjoying it, not trying to think about things too much, but to sit and feel the game experience wash over, making it a breath of fresh air to play. Taking the role of Kurt, equipped with a fancy suit that allows for gliding, shooting, sniping and others you face a whole series of mild, shooting based challenges taking out the most comedy of comedy aliens.

The game never immerses itself in any sense of seriousness about what you're doing with aliens who play peek-a-boo with you and levels which are like an enormous kids playground. The controls have been well thought out and are intuitive to use allowing for fast game play.

The Bad
I've no real negative comments about this game, some may consider it too short, but I like short games. Being developed for consoles too means there's check-point style saving, but in a fun and frantic game like this saving halfway through an action sequence would detract from the manic fun.

The Bottom Line
Looking for a fun game that's a world away from heavy games that try to make you believe serious reasons why you should shoot up aliens? This is the one.

DOS · by RussS (807) · 2009

On a good day, 2.5 billion people will die

The Good
Since in theory you can put anything in a video game, it's surprising how damned unimaginative many games are. The quest for "realism" has produced many pretentious and mediocre games that fail in the basic requirement for a game; to be entertaining. Arcade-style games have less trouble in this regard, as they can suspend the laws of physics and realism any time they want for the sake of a roller-coaster gaming experience. MDK is one such game. While tactical and strategic shooters bog themselves down with realistic physics, firing modes, and squad AI (sometimes sacrificing gameplay to do so), it's nice to see a shooter that has no pretensions about itself and desires only to entertain.

MDK is an over-the-shoulder 3rd person shooter where you play as Kurt (a cute, androgynous little guy with a chaingun cannon built into his arm), who is apparently earth's sole defence against a menacing breed of Alien spacecraft called Minecrawlers. Your goal is to board each of these Minecrawlers (they're as big as a good-sized city) and shut them down through whatever means necessary. This amounts to progressing through a series of linear levels, blasting enemies, and finding out what you have to do to destroy the Minecrawler. This is different on each level, sometimes you'll have to deactivate a set of switches/blow something up, other times you'll have to fight a boss.

The meat of the game is centered around massive set-piece shooting sequences interspersed with puzzles that are similar to Rayman. You have unlimited ammo, and a parachute built into your exoskeleton that allows you to glide across huge chasms with ease. At the press of a button you can switch into sniper mode, which allows you to zoom in and blow away enemies that are seemingly miles away. This versatile combat system allows the developers to pile on the baddies and force the player into seemingly impossible situations that can be escaped through obscure logic and creative use of Kurt's talents.

To add more variety to the game they threw in a bunch of other oddball gameplay conventions, including rail-shooting, hover board flying, Crash-Bandicoot-style tunnel-surfing, and even a few well-placed mini-games (that actually add to the gameplay instead of serving as mere gimmicks and distractions unlike most mini-games). You get a bonus if you complete a level within a set time limit, and a funny one-liner from your boss if you don't.

Already you have the premise for an engaging and quirky action game. But Shiny pulls out all the stops for their fans by pulling off set-piece stunts of sheer audacity. Have you ever seen something in a videogame so amazing and unexpected it sent your brain into a near-meltdown, something that made you think "HOLY CRAP, I HAD NO IDEA THEY COULD DO SOMETHING LIKE THAT". I'm talking about things like the skydiving gun battle in No One Lives Forever, the zero-gravity level in Quake, the fight against Ganondorf in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, where you think you've won and suddenly Ganon comes back to life for a showdown of near-apocalyptic proportions. Yeah, stuff so mind-numbingly brilliant that it takes your dignity, your sense of reason, and the layer of cynical jadedness that surrounds ever gamer and throws it into an industrial wood chipper.

Well, MDK is full of moments like that. Time and again you'll be thinking you've seen it all and then the game will shock you with something new. One time I was running towards an exit or safety with only a few points of health left, thinking "whew, I did it" and than suddenly the walls of the building fell out to reveal massive laser-shooting turrets that turned the entire level into a technicolor killing zone. The whole feel of the game is one of hectic, unbroken spontaneity, as if the level design was being channeled directly from the mind of Dr Seuss to a C++ program. Many tricks and set-pieces could have easily detracted from the gameplay, or played no other part other than eye-candy, but Shiny pulls them off with brass balls. The final boss fight was so hilariously creative I felt the urge to applaud.

The acid-tripping world MDK is set in complements the action and skewers the lunatic, over-the-top feel the game has. Think of Chronicles of Riddick crossed with Tron and you have an idea of what to expect. At no point does the game try to be realistic so any sort of architecture is possible, ranging from urban environments to sandy deserts to completely nonsensical fantasy worlds that were seemingly thought up on the whim of the developers. There's hardly any eye-candy, though this is no criticism.

The game is graphically exceptional with a first-generation polygon engine that looks far less blocky than Quake 2 or Unreal, and is faster too. It doesn't have real-time lighting to play with, but makes up for it with reflective surfaces and even some particle and flame effects. But the star of the show here is Kurt himself, with by far the most detailed model in the game with some exquisitely well-rendered animations and movements (look at him while sidestepping). The enemy models are very blocky but equally well animated, and will gesticulate and taunt you from a distance. MDK is also one of the first games to have a completely bug-free sniper mode, you can zoom in and out on targets anywhere without having to worry about clipping problems.

The music video (performed by pop group BZK) you get when you beat the game was a hoot, and I wish developers would include stuff like this more often in their games.

The Bad
The cutesy enemies and general level of quirkiness would probably just annoy many of you (make no mistake, MDK has "CONSOLE GAME" stamped all over it) and aside from the music video the ending is as unrewarding as you can get, consisting of little more than a short cutscene and Nintendo style a-winner-is-you screen. But hey, the game itself was so crazy and unpredictable maybe my expectations were unreasonably high.

As far as actual criticisms go MDK is insanely linear. You get led by the nose through a series of tunnels and passages with maybe two or three divergent paths throughout the entire game (seriously, I'm not exaggerating) that you need to explore in order to unlock some other area. The game's puzzles are retarded "figure out which brick you need to shoot" affairs that are usually a matter of trial and error. And the final boss fight, cute though it is, is perhaps the easiest part of the game.

And it's damned short.

The Bottom Line
While not for everyone, MDK is a crazed, high-octane shooter full of originality and invention. Games like this one are rare, and to be treasured wherever you find them.

DOS · by Maw (832) · 2007

[ View all 10 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Tips Jim Seward Mar 6, 2013
MDK game series fansite Mnich47 (2) Nov 27, 2010
Stuck in level 3 vedder (70685) Apr 3, 2010

Trivia

1001 Video Games

MDK appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Advertising

Early ads for MDK appeared with the slogan: "Prepare for a religious experience." The game's slogan was later changed to: "On a good day, 2.5 billion people will die".

Development

According to MDK developer diary (August 1st, 1996), one level of the game was developed by demosceners.

German version

In the German version the green blood was re-coloured blue and gore effects (cut off limbs, exploding heads after headshots) were removed. Additional changes are the removed "headshot" statistic and different, less human sounding screams for the kamikaze aliens. A detailed list of changes can be found on schnittberichte.com (German).

iMac

MDK was one of two video games, alongside Nanosaur, that were bundled with Apple's original 1998 iMac when it launched in August of 1998. The game was not included with the later (1999) Rev. C, Rev. D, and Rev. DV/SE iMac models.

Intro

The PC version does not have an intro movie (only the Playstation version does), but you can clearly see pieces of the intro in the final video after beating the game, albeit in black in white (intro was made in glorious color).

Movie

There was a plan to make a Hollywood movie based on MDK, but obviously this didn't come about. Shiny also got an offer for an animated series, but they didn't accept since they were holding out for the movie.

Music video

The music video that plays at the end of the game is from the song "Non, Non, Rien N'a Changé" by the French band Billy Ze Kick and whom the development team are apparently fans of (they even urge you to buy their CD's on the readme file... good luck finding any!). The song appeared on the band's 1996 album Paniac and was released as a single in 1997.

North American Edition

The PC version of MDK sold in North America and Canada had a bright yellow sticker proclaiming 'Exclusive North America Edition!' (see Cover Art section). It is not known if there are any differences to the other versions.

References

  • In the sled-surfing sequences you'll find a unique power-up not found legally elsewhere in the game (sometimes hidden on an overhead opening you can jump to instead of continuing through the main courses, sometimes laying in plain sight. The hidden arena 9 in world 5, only reachable by using the "givemealliwant" cheat, contains more of them.) These power-ups are actually the face of Jim from Shiny's Earthworm Jim. Get them and for each one you catch a cow will fall on top of your enemies.
  • The first minecrawler you must fight is heading towards Laguna beach. This is where Shiny's development studio was located at the time.

References to the game

The PlayStation version of the game can be seen played during the very first scene of an episode of the science fiction series The X-Files. Series 5 episode 9 "Schizogeny" starts with a full close up of the games running, and then it pans across to the main character of the story who is playing it.

Soundtrack

There is a soundtrack disc for MDK by Tommy Tallarico. It was released in 1997. The soundtrack can be bought at http://www.synsoniq.com

Tracklist:

  1. Prologue
  2. Stranger Things
  3. The Enemy Among Us
  4. Facing the Inevitable
  5. An Upscale Affair
  6. Vengeful Alien
  7. Grenich Time
  8. Portrait of an Insane Asylum
  9. A Padded Cell
  10. New Territories
  11. Dreaming of Victory
  12. Starship
  13. Gunter Planet
  14. World Militia
  15. Tribal Unity
  16. Crossfire
  17. Bounty Hunter
  18. MDK (Planet Trax Remix)

The soundtrack disc was packaged along with the game itself in Germany, where it sold over 50,000 copies.

Title

The meaning of "MDK" was the subject of many discussions. The most popular interpretations are:

  • Mission: Deliver Kindness (From the manual)
  • Max, Dr. Hawkins, Kurt (the protagonists)
  • Murder, Death, Kill (from the 1993 movie Demolition Man)

When asked, each MDK developer said that MDK stands for something different:

  • My Diary something beginning with K
  • My Dog Ken
  • Million Dollar Ko
  • Massive Dollops of Ketchup

In the FAQ section of the readme.txt file of MDK, the developers state that "MDK" does not stand for anything special, and can be whatever you want it to stand for, such as Mother's Day Kisses.

In a 2009 interview, Perry stated that "Murder Death Kill" was the title used for the first internal promotional video but had to be replaced because a planned toy line.

Information also contributed by Agent 5, Atomic Punch!, Dmichal, festershinetop, MAT, Maw, Mickey Gabel, Sheldonist, shifter and Zovni

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by robotriot.

Browser added by Sciere. PlayStation added by Adam Baratz. Antstream added by lights out party. Macintosh added by Mullet of Death.

Additional contributors: Ray Soderlund, Unicorn Lynx, Jeanne, Игги Друге, Peter Ferrie, Paulus18950, Patrick Bregger, Mnich47, Plok, FatherJack, WONDERなパン.

Game added November 1, 1999. Last modified March 19, 2024.