We delve into the bloody history of Mortal Kombat and talk to its creator Ed Boon

Mortal Kombat has undergone a variety of changes in order to recapture its early 90s glory days. Mortal Kombat: Armageddon has recently been released for Nintendo’s Wii, and not only has the machine’s innovative controller helped to breathe new life into what some gamers was fearing had become a rapidly stagnating series – it has also proven that there’s still plenty of mileage in one of gaming’s most brutal franchises, even if it is now seen as a shadow of its former self.

But wait, we’re getting somewhat ahead of ourselves. We’re only in the second paragraph and are already praising a brand new release, so let’s remember that we are actually first and foremost a retro gaming magazine, borrow Richard Burton’s time machine and head back to good old 1992.

Hmm, Burton’s machine must be on the blink, as instead of arriving at Mortal Kombat’s first public unveiling, we’re outside the offices of Midway, and it’s 1991, not 1992!

“What you have to remember is that the original game was our response to a number of things,” begins co-creator Ed Boon. “Obviously Street Fighter II was huge in 1991 and Midway had not entered into the fighting arena yet. We also had this new digitised images technology, which (at the time) was state of the art and we wanted to do a game that would lend itself to big images. Finally we were all fans of those cool (and sometimes cheesy) martial arts movies like Enter The Dragon, Bloodsport and Big Trouble In Little China.”

As a result of all these different reasons, work on Mortal Kombat surged ahead and Boon, co-creator John Tobias and the rest of the four-man team were soon on their way to creating a rival to Capcom’s incredibly successful sequel. While the small team was confident of their new title, they knew full well the might of what they were up against and were not arrogant enough to assume they had a ‘Street Fighter II beater’ on their hands.

“I don’t think we were ever dreaming THAT big at the time,” laughs Boon. That would have been like trying to come up with a ‘Windows Beater’ operating system.”

With Midway wanting to counter the success of Capcom’s seemingly unstoppable beat-’em-up behemoth as quickly as possible, Boon soon encountered his first major problem.

Time – or lack thereof. “Mortal Kombat was put together in an incredibly fast time,” he confirms. “I’d say that from start to finish it took us roughly eight months and the biggest problem we encountered was trying to do the game in such a small time frame. Thankfully, once we got the basic fighting down and everyone was so excited about that aspect of the game, the rest of the gameplay just sort of fell into place.”

Wanting to stay away from the six-button set-up that had served Street Fighter II so well, Midway instead devised a four-button system for alternating light and heavy punches and kicks, while a fifth button was controversially used to block (many fighting games of the time, including Street Fighter II, simply required you to pull back on the joystick).

“We always found it odd that you would get a ‘free block’ if someone was attacking you while you were walking backwards,” explains Boon about their unusual decision. “We felt blocking should be a much more deliberate action that the player should initiate, as opposed to sometimes being done automatically.”

… continued