If you do a YouTube search for “Mortal Kombat 1” here in December, you won’t have to scroll long to find more than a few videos that claim the game is dead or dying, and while there are recent reasons for such takes, the fact is the same search would have gotten widely similar results 10 months ago.
Mortal Kombat 1 has struggled to keep its head above water since shortly after day one, and Gaming Bolt is one of the many taking closer looks as to exactly why the latest entry in the long-running franchise is struggling so hard. If we look beyond the individual faults of MK1, might it be a case of over saturation of Kombat?
NetherRealm Studios kicked off back in 2011 with Mortal Kombat 9, an entry that, like Mortal Kombat 1, revamped the franchise’s main story. The 2011 entry was a success upon release and is now revered as one of the most important in franchise history, but developers did not just skip right along to Mortal Kombat X after that.
Instead, Ed Boon and his team surprised their two dimensional fighting game fan base with Injustice: Gods Among Us, a similar to Mortal Kombat experience that featured DC characters like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman duking it out in elaborate but Teen-rated battles.
It wasn’t until 2015 that NRS rolled out the aforementioned Mortal Kombat X, and that wound up being hailed as another one of the franchise’s best entries. The tenth Mortal Kombat was then followed a few years later with a sequel to Injustice, and thus a pattern was established that fans could resonate with.
Not everyone who played one franchise played the other, but time and distraction between titles surely allowed hearts to grow fonder than they might have otherwise. NetherRealm hit us with Mortal Kombat 11 in 2019, but when fans naturally started suspecting an Injustice 3 around 2021, they were left wanting.
The two-year release pattern was broken, and when Mortal Kombat 1 finally dropped in late 2023, so was the alternating franchise pattern. One does have to wonder if, in addition to the myriad of issues MK1 has faced from within, whether or not fans are suffering from a little bit of Kombat fatigue given they were just recently conditioned with different expectations.
Gaming Bolt covers MK1’s early, recent, and bigger picture issues in their full video here. Give it a watch and then let us know in the comments how you feel about MK1, what NRS should do next, and if Injustice 3 would come as a much-appreciated breath of fresh air at this point.