Though it’d be pretty darn tame by today’s entries
For over 30 years now, Mortal Kombat has remained one of the leaders in the space of fighting games, and though there’s hundreds if not thousands of people working on the new titles, two people in particular were present to lay the groundwork of everything that would define the franchise.
The creators of Mortal Kombat Ed Boon and John Tobias recently sat down together again to discuss at length the series that was the amalgamation of everything they loved after not really working side by side for the past few decades.
At the Cleveland Gaming Classic 2024 convention, the guys who brought the likes of Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Raiden, Johnny Cage and everyone else from the klassic days appeared on a special Mortal Kombat reunion panel alongside designer and actor Sal Divita and former Sonya Blade model / actor Kerri Hoskins.
Johnny Tobias, the son of the original developer, recently shared part of his recording from the panel where the creators talk about what into making the games — and some things that didn’t make the cut.
“The first game was just little paragraphs of the characters, but players just attached themselves to, you know, Liu Kang’s my guy, or Raiden’s my guy, or Sonya’s my girl,” started Boon at the start of the clip.
“And I really think that plays such a significant role in Mortal Kombat’s success, it was not only this crazy really fast paced, violent, visually different than anything, but these characters to this date, they’re making a movie about Scorpion and his rivalry with Sub-Zero in the Netherrealm and all that stuff, they’re still doing it to this day.”
Tobias then chimed in to talk about how their interests shaped what they wanted Mortal Kombat to be.
“The things we grew up loving and everything that made us who we were at the time, we just like threw it all at Mortal Kombat” – John Tobias
“That game and what it kind of became back in the early games, it really was a conglomeration of kind of who Ed and I were at the time. The things we grew up loving and everything that made us who we were at the time, we just threw it all at Mortal Kombat,” continued Tobias.
“People always point out like hey they could A little bit of this book or this character or this film or this song or whatever, you know, in the game. And that really is because we literally just took everything about who we were at the time and put it into this game as best we could.
“And it really was kind of an expression of who we were at the time. And just the fact that it resonated, and we were very lucky that it happened in the way that it did, but I’m very proud that it really was very organic.
“There was a lot of planning, a lot of hard work that we put into it, but the fact that we really just took these things that we love and tried to weave it together and express it through that game worked out the way that it did. I’m very proud of that. It’s it’s I think we’re very fortunate that it happened the way it did.”
Boon goes on to discuss how he used to be the only programmer at the start, but now his team at NetherRealm Studios is in the hundreds while he himself hasn’t actually touched game code in around 20 years.
And while the original group of four guys ad Midway would work for eight months to complete an arcade game from beginning to shipping, that process is now up to three or more years in modern gaming.
Interestingly, Tobias would briefly talk about a Fatality that he worked on that they actually felt went a bit too far back then despite spine ripping and blowing up bodies being okay for them back then.
“I had actually done some animations of guts spilling out. Baraka was going to slice a guy in the midsection and guts were going to spill out on the floor. I think we were like we can’t. We felt like we were pushing it too far back then, but that was one we opted to self-edit.”
He doesn’t mention which game, but we presume that to be Mortal Kombat 2.
It’s a bit funny that was a line they didn’t want to cross back then when a Fatality like that would be pretty tame by Mortal Kombat 1’s standards and what we just saw out of Noob, Cyrax and Sektor in Khaos Reigns this past week.
The controversies of Mortal Kombat’s level of violence helped lead to the creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board back in 1994 that’s still used to rate games in the United States 30 years later, so it’s interesting to hear thoughts from the creators on that sort of system now.
“The record industry had a label for explicit lyrics or something. Movies, forever had rated R rated PG, PG-13, and all that. Even television had ratings,” said Boon. “Video games were kind of like the last one to kind of jump onto the bandwagon.
“By no means when we were making the first game were we thinking you know, ‘I can’t wait for a six-year-old to play this game’ – Ed Boon
“So by no means when we were making the first game were we thinking you know, I can’t wait for a six-year-old to play this game. Nobody was thinking that. At some point we realized that some of the ratings were necessary, and it was something that we agreed with.”
Tobias expanded on that idea, explaining how the idea that video games were just children’s toys became outdated when people who grew up with them did not stop playing, which expanded what the medium could be.
“Video games back then were kind of thought of as toys for kids. And I think that the realization was was happening that these kids, who were playing games, they’re not stopping,” said Tobias. “Like I was still playing, I was a developer, but I was still playing games. My friends were all still playing games, and they’re now in their 20s.
“And I think it was the realization that games aren’t this thing created for kids. Games are for all ages, just like film and television. There’s content and media created for people of all ages and different games, appeal to different age groups. And, and I think games now, of course, are very different from what they were back then.
“But back, especially coming out of the ’80s, there was, of course, the coin op market, but I think especially the home console market was thought of as ‘these things are being produced for kids.’ And that was changing in the ’90s. It was changing because again, no one, no one stopped. I didn’t stop. I’m sure a bunch of folks out there crowd. You didn’t stop playing video games. Everybody just kept playing.”
Boon also discusses a bit again how he feels Mortal Kombat is close to becoming a “forever franchise” like Marvel, DC and Star Wars that’ll continue to live on in different forms and media even long after he and everyone else currently working on it are done.
You can check out Johnny Boon’s edited video of the MK reunion panel below where the group talks about even more topics like the original 1995 movie and how much that changed from initial impressions from fans and themselves.
Loved hearing Ed & my dad talk Mortal Kombat at the Cleveland Gaming Classic w Kerri Hoskins & Sal Divita @noobde @therealsaibot @KerriAnnGallery @Sal_DiVita @GameOnCleveland @RealmKast #mortalkombat #raidensciencefoundation pic.twitter.com/p5XsuMrt0W
— Johnny Tobias (@youngsaibot) September 27, 2024