“We realized that players were really intrigued by the backstory of these characters.”
Meanwhile, there were various in-game storytelling experiments, including the single-player Konquest mode from the PS2 era. Longtime fans may remember the short-lived attempt to turn Mortal Kombat into a blockbuster action film series, with the 1995 film and its 1997 sequel, Annihilation. But it’s also something the team has wanted to do since early on in the series’s life. In an age when fighting games are steadily moving away from storytelling to focus on the competitive side, MK11’s big-budget single-player campaign stands out. “I’ll say, ‘Why don’t we do this?’ and they’ll say, ‘Well, no because in Mortal Kombat 4, we established this happened.’”) So when you see MK2 Scorpion meeting MK11 Scorpion, fighting together or fighting each other, there’s something really cool about that.” (To keep track of the series’s increasingly convoluted storyline, Boon says he relies on MK writers Dominic Cianciolo and Shawn Kittelsen, keepers of the lore. “It really plays on people’s memories of Mortal Kombat. “We really wanted to tap into the nostalgia of the older versions of these characters,” says Boon. Ed Boon (right) at a Mortal Kombat 11 reveal event in January. The new game mixes up these various timelines so that younger and older versions of Mortal Kombat veterans are interacting with each other.
MKX fast-forwarded the series 25 years into the future, giving fans a look at aging versions of classic fighters like Johnny Cage. “The first thing we talk about is, ‘What are we going to do new that hasn’t been done in our previous games?’” he explains. There are some staples we know we don’t want to change up, but we are firm believers that we have to keep changing.”īoon says that the desire to create something different is the starting point for any new Mortal Kombat. “The reason why we’re going stronger than ever is because we’re not afraid well, actually, we are afraid, but we don’t hesitate to make dramatic changes to the formula of the game. “It’s scary, but it’s necessary,” he says. According to creative director and series creator Ed Boon, this desire to keep changing is one of the key reasons Mortal Kombat has managed to stay relevant for so long.
MK11 features a redesigned fighting system aimed at more strategic play, along with a much bigger focus on the story. The most recent release, 2015’s Mortal Kombat X sold 11 million copies, making it the biggest MK release to date.Ĭoming off of a hit like that, you might expect developer NetherRealm Studios to offer more of the same, but with Mortal Kombat 11, which launches today, the team decided to change things up. In fact, Mortal Kombat is arguably more popular now than at any point in history.
The Mortal Kombat series has been around since 1992, but it’s a franchise that has aged surprisingly gracefully.