Ed Boon is a co-creator of Mortal Kombat and currently serves as Creative Director at NetherRealm Studios.
18 June 2010
Kamidogu: Hi this is Chris from Kamidogu here with series co-creator Ed Boon. How are you going today Ed?
Ed Boon: Very good, thanks.
Kamidogu: Obviously the teaser of the game is now out in the open, and you’ve shown off a little bit more in the presentation a bit earlier today. How do you feel, are you happy with the reaction you’ve been getting so far?
EB: I couldn’t have asked for a better reaction. I feel like we really hit like a nerve with a lot of Mortal Kombat players, you know, what they would really wanna see. You know and that was really our goal in the beginning, was to identify all the things that people wanted to see in a Mortal Kombat game, and deliver that as hard as possible.
Kamidogu: Now there’s been a few questions about the game. Is the game a reboot, and if it is what timeframe is it set in?
EB: Officially it’s not a reboot, I think in some ways you can think of it as a reboot. You really have to kinda see the story to kinda understand you’re really kind of reliving the events of Mortal Kombats 1, II and 3, but from the perspective of the end of Armageddon. So, there’s some time travel involved and there’s some re-imagining of certain events that I think the players will really like the story twist that we have.
Kamidogu: How many characters should we expect in the game, and will we see any new faces?
EB: We don’t have a final number yet, obviously cause we’re like you know, nine, ten months out from the final release, but if we have new or hidden characters we’ve already decided that we weren’t going to talk about them cause we really want the hidden features in the game to remain hidden and people to discover them. So, there’s certainly a chance for new characters, there’s certain a chance for returns other ones, and so.
Kamidogu: Will we see any classic things like Test Your Might or Choose Your Destiny coming back at all?
EB: You know I guess I can’t rule them out right now. We currently don’t have it in the build, but it’s certainly not out of the question.
Kamidogu: Will we see any other modes coming back like Konquest or Kreate-A-Fighter?
EB: I don’t think we’re going to have a Kreate-A-Fighter in this version; I don’t know if we’ve seen the end of Kreate-A-Fighter, but this version probably won’t have one. Our Story Mode is gonna more resemble the format that we did in our last Mortal Kombat game as opposed to the Konquest mode.
Kamidogu: What about online, are we doing anything different this time around for online mode, obviously with the two-on-two fighting as well?
EB: Sure, yeah we’re gonna have the one-on-one fighting, the tag team fighting, and we’re also gonna have these rooms that you can go into that are everybody’s kinda fighting round-robin and see who can be kinda the king of the hill, where the spectators can kind of participate and lend commentary (boo, cheer, and all that), so it’s a lot more of an interactive kind of spectator mode.
Kamidogu: Obviously with the endings as well do you think we’ll see the still pictures as in the last few games, or sort of full motion video?
EB: You know I think it’s probably gonna be something in between the two. They’re certainly not gonna be just still images, they’re gonna be a lot more animation and it’ll be presented in a stylised kinda way. I don’t think it’s gonna be rendered video, like kind of like we’ve in our—we have a ton of that in our Story mode which is great, but the endings are gonna be more like a stylised almost like a live graphic novel type approach.
Kamidogu: The final boss as well, obviously I don’t know if you have decided it yet, but are we looking at at maybe a new boss or someone I guess that we’ve seen before?
EB: Well like I said, at this point we’re only talking about the eight characters that we have in the game right now, so I probably shouldn’t be talking about which boss is in the game and what he’s like.
Kamidogu: Mortal Kombat’s been out since 1992, do you have any plans for its 20th anniversary coming up?
EB: Um…no, but that’s a really good question. I guess when this game comes out it’ll be 2011 which’ll be nineteen years, and I suppose it might be cool to do something to celebrate it. I don’t know it might be cool to have all nine games or something on one disc, I don’t know if it would fit but it’d would be cool. I dunno, I hope we do something.
Kamidogu: Obviously you’ve got the Mortal Kombat Rebirth trailer that came out, that little production that was put through. There was a really positive reaction from the fan base about it, how do you guys personally feel about the whole thing?
EB: I thought it was amazing, I thought it was really great. I was just actually spending a few minutes talking to the guy who played Reptile, and I might be meeting the director tomorrow which would be cool too. I think it’s a great re-imagining of the story, you know I think that the comic books have done that quite a bit where they have somebody do like an alternate universe of Batman or Superman, and I think that fits perfectly with another Mortal Kombat movie.
Kamidogu: Alright, and finally as well—obviously everything’s out in the open now, we’ve got fans lining up right down the corridor. Looking at the reaction, what is the one thing I guess that makes you most proud of this game?
EB: I think to me it’s the whole process of the talking with players and how it brings up their memories of playing the first games. You know, like they say “Oh it makes me feel like I was playing Mortal Kombat II,” or you know things like that. Those are the really cool things, cause that was really our goal, was to kinda celebrate those first three games.
Kamidogu: Alright, thank you very much for all your time today.
EB: Thanks, alright.