Again, the crazy thing about Mortal Kombat, it was four guys in their 20s who grew up on RoboCop, The Terminator, and Enter the Dragon - ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s movies - cut loose with pretty cutting-edge technology for the time - digitized graphics - and just hitting the sweet spot of our ideas, the acceptance of those ideas, the technology. I’ve read interviews with you and watched interviews with you where you talked about how Street Fighter 2 was big at the time, but what was it? Was it just Street Fighter is big, and we want to do something ? Or was there more of a directive from Midway to make a fighting game, Mortal Kombat ? There was a lot of excitement - we had a lot of ideas that we wanted to try that we thought were going to end up being very cool. We were in our 20s, and it was a different time. ![]() It was just us taking guesses: Yeah, this should work, and that should work. Everything was fresh and new - first fighting game, first everything. When you look back on those, what stands out to you?Įd Boon: I have to keep reminding myself that none of the 30 years of experience that we’ve learned is being applied there. ![]() Polygon: I follow you on Twitter, and I’ve seen that you’ve been posting a lot of great making-of videos from the original Mortal Kombat. ![]() There’s a DIY charm to these videos, which show martial artists and inexperienced game designers clearly unaware of the cultural phenomenon they’re about to unleash.Įarlier this week, I had a chance to speak with Boon, now chief creative officer at NetherRealm Studios, about his memories working on Mortal Kombat - and where the franchise is headed after the most recent entry in the series, 2019’s Mortal Kombat 11. Mortal Kombat fans can watch those videos to see Boon and Tobias riffing in real time about how their game will work. Those videos show the challenges of working with relatively young technology - digitized graphics of real-life actors - and designing a video game on the fly. Over the past year, Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon has been looking back at the creation of the original game, releasing unearthed footage of its development on Twitter. Thirty years later, however, Mortal Kombat remains a beloved franchise, for its over-the-top presentation and its AAA quality. With its trademark blood splashes, decapitations, and gruesome fatalities, Mortal Kombat became better known for its graphic violence than its actual gameplay. ![]() Alongside 16-bit shlock like Night Trap, the spotlight on Mortal Kombat - especially its wildly successful home console versions - was largely responsible for the implementation of a video game ratings system. The creation of Mortal Kombat also changed the conversation around violence in video games. Mortal Kombat changed fighting games forever and became a billion-dollar multimedia franchise. Together with Chicago-area actors and martial artists Daniel Pesina and Carlos Pesina, Richard Divizio, Ho Sung Pak, and Elizabeth Malecki, they created an instant classic packed with enduring characters like Scorpion, Sub-Zero, and Sonya Blade. That game not only capitalized on the arcade fighting game craze spurred by Street Fighter 2 - it spawned a franchise that has endured over dozens of sequels, spinoffs, movies, and animated series.Īt the now-defunct Midway Games, Mortal Kombat was created by an unthinkably small team: programmer Ed Boon, artist John Tobias, sound programmer and composer Dan Forden, and artist John Vogel. Thirty years ago this week, the original Mortal Kombat hit arcades.
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