Click here to read the entire interview.G4: Mortal Kombat was intended to appeal a casual audience as well as eSports-level players for the first time. How did you strike that balance? How did it end up being received?
Ed Boon: That was part of our agenda when we started the game. To appeal to both calibers of players. The way that we did it was our designers are really into hardcore fighting and all of the mechanics that some of the more casual players don’t get into. I was kind of like the guardian of the casual players. I kept insisting that we don’t have features that are too complicated or that we retain the accessibility that Mortal Kombat has always had. There were certain guys on the team who would push one direction and others would push another direction. We had plenty of conversations with disagreeing that would end in trying our best to satisfy both camps.
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Mortal Kombat 9 has the most in-depth story in the series to date. How do you feel this differentiates the franchise from other games in the fighting genre that try to incorporate stories?
I think the main reason is the amount of effort that we put into telling the story. We have this completely cinematic story mode that no other fighting game has even attempted. I do feel that we set a bar with that. We’ve heard a number of our competitors acknowledge what we did with it and say that it’s a great thing for the fighting genre. I think the main way we were able to do it is to devote so much time and effort to create that story mode. It was millions of dollars. It wasn’t a minor side mission, it was one of our starring features of the game. I think it was the effort that we put into it.
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Kratos from God of War fame also appeared in the new Mortal Kombat as a PS3-exclusive character. How hard was it to work in an outside character? Who’s your dream non-MK character to work into the series?
Kratos was certainly one of them before we managed to get him in there. The guys at Sony Santa Monica were as protective of Kratos as we are with our characters. So we were certainly understanding and respectful of that. And we also knew that we’re all in the industry. A few of us have actually worked together. it was a very collaborative and very good experience working with them. At first, they were a little adverse to seeing fatalities performed on Kratos. But once they opened up to that idea, all of our characters certainly have that done on them, they were cool with it.
As far other characters in Mortal Kombat games, Freddy Krueger was one of them and we managed to get that. To me, it’d be cool to see other characters from other fighting games, Ken and Ryu from Street Fighter or someone from Tekken would be fun ones as well.
Right. Crossovers seem like all the rage right now. Would you ever think about doing a full crossover with another fighting series?
We absolutely have thought about it. One of the obstacles is that we’re an M-rated game and all of the other ones, for the most part, are T-rated games. So it’s the same challenge with had with pairing up with the DC characters. It’s harder to match up with which style are you going to go with. But we’ve all dreamt with crossing over with Street Fighter or Tekken. Killer Instinct was also one that was coming up since they were an M-rated game as well. But I’ll tell you that we’ve had many, many conversations along those lines.
How did Shao Kahn get his awesome powers like god-like strength, extreme brutality and the knowledge of black magic?
Shao Kahn has always been the Emperor and and the top-of-the-food-chain bad guy. We’ve told the story in a number of different ways, like he was affiliated with Raiden and the elder gods, and then there’s also been ones where he’s been with Shang Tsung and what not. But it depends on the different lore that you read, whether it’s the comic book, our games or the movies.
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You always try to keep Mortal Kombat unlockabkle characters and hidden features a secret. How hard has that been for your studio in the modern day of social media?
Absolutely impossible. The unfortunate reality is that the process of making a game, you have many, many testers, analysts, people from Microsoft and Sony, who all have to look at the game and we have to disclose every single hidden feature to them. And as much as everybody signs NDAs, somehow that information always leaks out. I think we put Babalities into the game, we never talked about it officially and the second day after the game came out every single Babality was already on YouTube. So it shows you how well that worked.
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