MDK (1997)
MDK is a 1997 shooter video game made by Shiny Entertainment and Playmates Interactive Entertainment.
Kurt Hectic is a janitor. This fact matters because Kurt's employer, the possibly-unhinged scientist Dr. Fluke Hawkins, has strapped him into a coil-suit and launched him at a fleet of alien Minecrawlers: city-sized strip-mining vehicles grinding their way across Earth's surface. The premise is deliberately absurd, the weapons are enormous, and MDK commits to both without apology. The game alternates between Kurt's precise sniping-focused on-foot levels, Dr. Hawkins' gadget-heavy sections in the Minecrawler control rooms, and the four-armed robot dog Bones running through corridors entirely on his own logic.
Quick answers
What is MDK about?
Kurt Hectic is a janitor. This fact matters because Kurt's employer, the possibly-unhinged scientist Dr. Fluke Hawkins, has strapped him into a coil-suit and launched him at a fleet of alien Minecrawlers: city-sized strip-mining vehicles grinding their way across Earth's surface. The premise is deliberately absurd, the weapons are enormous, and MDK commits to both without apology. The game alternates between Kurt's precise sniping-focused on-foot levels, Dr. Hawkins' gadget-heavy sections in the Minecrawler control rooms, and the four-armed robot dog Bones running through corridors entirely on his own logic.
When was MDK released?
MDK was released on 1 January 1997.
Who made MDK?
MDK was made by Shiny Entertainment, Playmates Interactive Entertainment and Interplay Entertainment.
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Explore MDK guides
MDK in our writing
- Companion guide: Interplay: By Gamers, For Gamers, and the Golden Age of the RPG
A few thoughts on MDK
Portal 2 shares MDK's investment in absurdist sci-fi comedy, building its world through eccentric characters and environmental puzzles that double as punchlines. Half-Life 2 trades the comedy for a more grounded tension, but the tight shooter design and sense of fighting a superior invading force from an underdog's position land in similar territory.
Absurdist music that commits fully to the bit
MDK never winks at its own premise, a janitor in a coil-suit sniping alien Minecrawlers, and that dead-serious delivery of a ridiculous idea matches Frank Zappa's Apostrophe and Sheik Yerbouti, Tenacious D's mock-epic rock mythology, and Bo Burnham's Inside, all of them treating absurd material with total sincerity.
One person against a machine built to crush everything
Kurt Hectic takes on city-sized alien Minecrawlers with nothing but a coil-suit and a sniper rifle, the same scale mismatch that drives Half-Life 2's fight against the Combine, Patlabor's cops squaring off against rogue mecha, and Portal and Portal 2's escapes from a facility built entirely to outthink you.
Mad scientists, everyday heroes, and the absurd inventions between them
Dr. Fluke Hawkins is the classic unhinged-genius partner to Kurt's reluctant everyman hero, a pairing that shows up again in Dr. Slump's mad-scientist household, The Simpsons' safety inspector stumbling into disaster after disaster, Sabrina's ordinary teenager handed extraordinary powers, and Crayon Shin-chan's willingness to let absurdity run the whole show.