A New Challenger

It’s difficult to imagine what the modern video game industry would be like if Mortal Kombat had not been born way back in the early 90’s. ‘There would have been no U.S. Senate hearings on the impact of violence in video gaming’, you might say. True, but without it happening, the ESRB as we know it might never have formed and the institutions that brought order to a very chaotic landscape probably would never have arisen. Institutions that eventually helped break boundaries for more mature content. We may never have experienced games like Heavy Rain, The Witcher, Mass Effect, or any number of “Mature” rated titles without this event taking place. It’s also difficult to imagine that, despite its impact, Mortal Kombat was originally just going to be a one-off experiment created by two friends before they moved on to something more…. galactic.

“Ironically, when we did the first Mortal Kombat, we were thinking, ‘Cool, we’re done with that. We’re going to start on a Star Wars game,'” recalls MK co-creator Ed Boon. “[But] the general manager at Midway at the time came to us and said, ‘No, you’re not. You’re doing another Mortal Kombat game.’ It was weird because it didn’t cross our minds immediately. It was this quick project to help fill the assembly line of arcade machines. We did it in eight months. All of a sudden, it was a thing, and then they continued to sell well.”

Yes, you read that right. Star Wars. But due to the popularity of Mortal Kombat, both on a positive and negative aspect, that lofty idea was eventually abandoned. “At the time, [around] 1993 or something, we were thinking that it would be cool to do an arcade Star Wars game,” Boon says. “I was a big fan of the three they had released – the vector one and the sprite-based ones. We thought, ‘Let’s do something with our digitized hardware.’ That dream didn’t last long.”

As its popularity and relevance ebbed and flowed with each iteration that followed, many who had been there since the beginning eventually moved on. Co-founder John Tobias himself left Midway in 2000, going on to found the short-lived development house, Studio Gigante (closed in 2005), and is now working as both a consultant in the games industry and as an employee of Zynga Inc. Midway itself faced its own hardships, eventually closing its doors in 2009. However, its one saving grace had been its acquisition by Warner Bros. Interactive, who decided to keep as many of the original staff as they could. From Midway’s ashes emerged NetherRealm Studios, and Ed Boon was now sole Creative Director of the Mortal Kombat series.

But beyond that, it’s been business as usual for the development veteran. “I wouldn’t necessarily say the Warner Bros. acquisition has affected the way we approach [Mortal Kombat],” he says. “We have a pretty well defined pipeline. What Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment has provided for us is the time needed to polish the game. They want a quality product and that’s what we are going to deliver.”

From what NetherRealm has shown us, Mortal Kombat X takes place over a period of twenty-five years, picking up right where the story in Mortal Kombat 9 ends and moving on from there. “At the end of that game Shao Kahn was defeated, and Mileena was on the verge of taking over the throne of Outworld,” says NetherRealm Senior Producer Hans Lo. “In that time Kotal Kahn, who’s one of our new characters, has come to power, usurped the throne from Mileena, and there’s a civil war raging between those two. Earth Realm is pulled into this, and they send off their young fighters to investigate. Is this a threat to our world? Of course, they go in, get involved, and eventually they find out that there might be something more going on here, there might be a bigger threat to deal with. And it kind of builds from there.”

Of course, twenty-five years is a long time for anyone. As old fighters move on, retire, or pass away, new challengers are waiting in the wings. NetherRealm is trying to make this transition as painless as possible, though, so expect to see a few familiar faces mixed in with the new. “Some of the characters popped in very naturally, just easy fits for the storyline,” Lo says. “The fact that we’re twenty-five years in the future means that we can experiment with a new, younger cast.

“These kids were born during the classic era, if you will, and they’re now in their twenties, coming into a universe that they’re not familiar with. They’re finding out things about their parents, about what they’ve experienced and been through. So that makes sense thematically, and then we wanted to have a new spin on the bad guy side too. We wanted to introduce somebody new, rather than the same old faces. Bring something to the storyline we haven’t really tried before.”

But just who made it on the roster wasn’t an easy decision. Some faces eventually had to hit the cutting room floor in order to avoid over-inflating the roster and diluting the storyline with too many cameo moments. “This was probably the hardest one we have done in a long time, because more than half of the roster is new,” says NetherRealm Producer Adam Urbano. “It took months and months and months. But we always knew that this was going to be the next-generation roster, meaning we were going to have to make some tough, tough cuts.”

Will we perhaps be seeing some of the more popular, but still cut character names in future DLC expansions? Possibly, says Urbano. “I hope so. I think our strategy is pretty well known at this point. The production team likes to find ways to make it so they can work until the last possible second to sneak on more and more content,” he says. “So, at that point when we are done.. then we start to look at all the fun stuff we couldn’t get to because we love these games and would work on the forever if we could.”

Just don’t expect to face off against long-dead Presidents. At last year’s E3 presentation, one of the fighter silhouettes seemed to be conspicuously… Lincoln’y. “That was me just being a d***,” Boon says laughing. “Over the years, Mortal Kombat has always had secrets in it, rumors that weren’t true. Clearly, we’re not going to put Abraham Lincoln in Mortal Kombat. In Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, we had a create-a-fighter feature. One time, we were playing the game online, and some guy had made Abraham Lincoln. We just thought it was the funniest thing in the world. So I said, ‘We have to put that as one of the boxes.'”

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