The Making Of: 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.”

David, inevitably, took that jump by investing some of his own money into the purchase of expensive Silicon Graphics terminals and 3D software, but watching his team get to grips with the new utilities wasn’t easy.

“It was like watching people paint with broken hands, I mean they were just banging their heads against the table, they just hated it. And you have to remember this was back when 3D Studio Max was pretty junky, so you’ve got this team who are used to drawing things with a pencil trying to use this thing. It was very difficult for me to watch,” explains David.

“I want to do a game where I can shoot someone in the eye from a mile away.” It was these slightly unsettling words from Nick Bruty that sparked the genesis of MDK. This was typical of Nick though; a throwaway idea, a scribble on a napkin, even the gratification found from shooting somebody in the eye a mile away, could be all it took for a game concept to take shape in his head.

“Nick Bruty was my real partner through all of the years,” recalls David. “We met up by chance in England when he happened to be working on a project that I started to work on, and from that point all the games I made in England, all the Spectrum games, we worked on together. The first game that we ever got started on was Trantor: The Last Stormtrooper. It was a big game, with big gorgeous graphics, so you could understand why I was attracted to Nick’s talent. When I later got a job offer in the US, while working on The Terminator, I flew over and recommended that they hire him. He was flown over soon after.”

“Back in those days when I was working with Nick, we had the freedom to do whatever we wanted because someone would always publish it,” he continues. “With MDK we pitched it as doing a game about a guy that jumps out of a spacecraft and flies to Earth with a sniper-rifle helmet. Not a lot of developer’s get that experience; often, they get treated as a resource. You’re a programmer and we’re going to move you from project to project – usually emergency to emergency – and they never get to go crazy on something that they think is interesting or funny.”

The ethos of MDK was built from the idea that, in videogames, the player couldn’t aim or shoot at enemies at any kind of distance. David and Nick felt the best way to solve this problem would be to think up a way of bringing enemies closer to the player. Eventually a sniper gun was added to the equation, but this would raise its own issues.

“The technical problem was accuracy,” admits David. “3D graphics at that time were reasonably inaccurate because people were always cheating with the math, so it became difficult to accurately shoot someone in the eye or on the hand. Our concept was that if you shot someone in the eye from a mile away they were dead immediately, no messing around. But then what happened, being the typical Shiny game, is that we would have humour with enemies mooning you because they didn’t think you could shoot them from that distance.”

The sniper rifle has since become a staple of the videogame diet. Pick up any first-person shooter and you can bet your last dollar that in your inventory you will eventually come by a high-precision weapon. MDK’s sniper rifle was markedly unique to the others that followed, as it formed the angular helmet of your protagonist Kurt and his line of sight when you switched the game into the first-person ‘sniper mode’. The scope on the helmet was also extremely powerful, allowing the player to zoom from one end of an ‘arena’ to the other and pick off the jibing, arse-brandishing Grunts from a sizeable distance. As well as a sniper rifle, Kurt’s suit also had a ‘coil chute’: a precariouslooking parachute made of ribbons that would automatically retract, giving enough breaking power to slow Kurt’s descent and let him glide safely from high platforms.

Kurt’s leather suit would play its own significant part in the look and success of MDK. It gave the game a dark and beautiful beacon to catch the eyes on magazine pages, coupling perfectly the game’s peculiar story and gothic imagery, which served well to pique the curiosity of gamers. David admits that during the development of MDK there was a constant debate as to whether the suit was symbiotic, alien, alive, or solely the fruits of technological advancement and the fertile imagination of an eccentric scientist.

“It was never truly defined whether it was alive or not,” explains David. “It was created by a scientist and it definitely has its own characteristics but it didn’t have the power to get up and run away. It was alive in the sense that at that time we really didn’t understand that there could be a material that would react in the way that we envisioned so it had to have some life to it, or some intelligence. But it didn’t have a heartbeat.”

“The suit was made up of this scaly black material,” David continues. “And the concept was that when Kurt got shot the suit would tense up at the exact spot where he had been shot, so he would receive the hit and the pain, but the bullet wouldn’t actually penetrate to his skin. This was perfect for our game design because getting shot hurts Kurt, but it doesn’t kill him right out. Ironically, I recently heard that the army has actually developed a material that does this now, where, if you shoot it, it will actually tighten up right at the point of the bullet’s contact. Also, I have a piece of material that they’re using for snowboarders, and it’s a similar thing. It’s a material that stiffens up in moments of impact, which is exactly the kind of stuff we were imagining way back in MDK.”

Kurt’s parachute led David to the possibilities of adding the aerial aspects to the game. And then it was also decided that a small section of the sniper helmet could be removed by Kurt and used as a sidearm.

We decided to ask David about the similarities of his three most prevalent heroes: Jim, Kurt and Bob (the cherubic protagonist in his MDK follow-up, Messiah), all unlikely heroes – earthworm, janitor and baby – who find strength from inside a suit. We wanted to know whether this was a running theme for Shiny or simply a tidy coincidence.

“We tend to base things on themes what themes I like,” says David. “And one of the themes is weak to strong and strong to weak and I think that is a partial videogame design trick that adds a lot to games. It’s really fun to have people feel really strong and then suddenly feeling very fragile, and to and I’m slowly beginning to understand have them go through that emotional curve. The higher and the lower the spikes you can make in that curve, the more fun it is. It’s fun to know you have a plasma gun and smart bombs inside your back pocket and know that when the game gets tough you can pull them out.

But then it’s equally as fun when it’s all stripped away from you and you don’t have anything, and you know that this is a really hairy situation, so when you do make it through you feel really great about it. What’s even better is in a certain moment, in the middle of the mayhem, we suddenly give you everything back you needed, you get back all your equipment and weapons and now you can just go nuts on everybody. We found that theme start to resonate in the work that we’ve done over the years.”

MDK’s backstory is easily Shiny’s most surrealist narrative and centres on three very juxtaposing central characters: Max, a four-armed robotic dog, scientist Dr Fluke and the doctor’s janitor, Kurt Hectic. The story goes that Dr Fluke Hawkins built a space station, named the Jim Dandy, to prove the existence of ‘Flange Orbits’ to his fellow scientist chums. He persuades his janitor, using Hungarian goulash, to accompany him on his mission.

However, their existence is soon debunked. Afraid that returning emptyhanded would result in him receiving untold amounts of ridicule by the science community, he remains on the space station and begins building a nifty little robot dog with four arms, who he calls Max.

As fate would have it, the good scientist would discover a strange phenomenon up in space; peculiar bolts of energy that disperse gargantuan machines known as Minecrawlers, that are capable of sucking a planet barren of its resources. With the Earth’s military completely obliterated by the alien invaders, and the planet on the brink of destruction, Dr Fluke steps in by unveiling an experimental coil suit capable of sapping ‘bullets, bees and very small sticks’. Kurt is then selected to don the black, leathery armour and is fired back down to Earth on his Mission to Deliver Kindness.

There was a considerable amount of media speculation surrounding the actual meaning of the three letters MDK. We’ve already mentioned a couple of different interpretations to be thrown at the three letters, both of which are hinted at in the game’s manual. The game, however, never actually solidifies any meaning. The ambiguity surrounding the moniker soon became a fortuitous viral-campaign, which David and his team were more than willing to play along with. ‘Murder Death Kill’, ‘Mother’s Day Kisses’, ‘Mrs Donkey Kong’, are just some of the ideas and conspiracy theories that would continue to flood in.

There still exists a veil of confusion over what those three letters were originally intended to represent, so we put the question to David. Admittedly, the words didn’t come easily, the question was clichéd, the words predictable and our voice apologetic. We put hand into pocket and produced a tatty old million dollar question, but David answered it cordially.

“The original pitch video that we did was originally called Murder Death Kill and our tag line was that ‘on a good day 2.5 billion people will die’,” he says. “So we had gone for this ‘world is absolutely screwed’ scenario; this alien menace is going to literally split Earth in half and destroy it. Now the title was Murder Death Kill, not in the sense that you’re doing all the killing, but in the sense that this is what’s happening to the world and your job was to try to save it. However, the toy company that we were working with at the time was like ‘are you kidding me, Toy’s “R” Us are going to stock Murder Death Kill toys?’ So we joked around and said it could stand for something else and it developed into this marketing ploy where no one could ever define it. If you actually asked me at the time my official answer was that it stood for the three lead characters in the game: Max, Dr Fluke and Kurt. But yes, Murder Death Kill is what we originally wanted to call the game.”

MDK became a cult hit, garnered critical acclaim in magazine pages and sold well enough to keep funding David and the projects that he wanted to make. It was never a breakout hit for the PC – as in the likes of Quake and Half-Life – and David believes that was due to MDK being primarily third-person and existing when FPS was the most raffish genre on the platform.

“During a speech about some of the stuff we were doing, I had this slide that said MDK was number one in ten countries, but it was these ten countries that you’ve never even heard of,” he says. “We joked about it. It was doing well, but not what we would’ve hoped. But these games live on, like Earthworm Jim. I still get asked about Earthworm Jim all the time, it just amazes me how you make a game like that and how it lives on in people’s heads.”