Of all the blood-sopping twists the Mortal Kombat franchise has taken over the years, none seemed quite as dramatic as those that befell its stars in 2008’s Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe. Instead being of the outlandishly brutal, cold-blooded death machines remembered from so many gamers’ childhoods, beloved menaces like Sub-Zero and Scorpion were fashioned as squeaky-clean comic-book heroes in a Teen-rated game. With this change, seemingly all the core elements that had once made the Mortal Kombat series an unrivaled cultural behemoth were abandoned.

“We knew we were making such a dramatic departure,” admits Ed Boon, co-creator of Mortal Kombat and creative director at the Chicago-based NetherRealm Studios. “I think Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe invigorated interest in a traditional Mortal Kombat. It worked in a lot of ways, but at the same time, when people didn’t see all the blood, gore, and fatalities, that created a void — a hunger for them. Players were insisting on it.”

Atonement came with the April release of Mortal Kombat, a game free of not only a number or subtitle, but also the baggage that comes with a franchise spanning nearly two decades. Mortal Kombat is a rare return to a series’ vaunted roots: it’s an accessible, entertaining fighter packed with violent acts and gore, yet it surprises with gameplay depth, long-lasting single-player modes, and arcade-like online battles. It also earned our Editors’ Choice award and topped the sales charts.

Home Is Where the Hurt Is

NetherRealm Studios — named after a particularly hellish area in the Mortal Kombat universe — saw its own share of change following the release of Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe. In 2009, its parent company, Midway Games, went bankrupt; Warner Bros. acquired most of its assets. This turn of events ended up being a blessing for fans, as the development team was reportedly told to focus more on quality over quantity for its next Mortal Kombat title.

Following multiple entries with 3D-combat elements, the team at NetherRealm felt it had to return the series to a 2D gameplay foundation. “Other than fatalities,” explains Boon, “that was the feature [fans most wanted back].” And while the past few Mortal Kombat games were popular, Boon says the genre was losing steam under the weight of overcomplicated 3D fighting experiences. Other famed fighting franchises — such as Samurai Showdown and Dragon Ball Z — hastened the genre’s decline with unrefined, convoluted offerings, a point that Boon acknowledges.

“Fighting games were becoming too complex. They were fun and great, but they were getting to the point where you had to practice on the game for weeks before you could become proficient at it,” Boon claims. “Players just don’t have that kind of patience for — or commitment to — spending so much time learning a game before you can become competitive with it.”

With the perspective set, the next priority was determining the tone of the experience. While the softer, Teen-rated appeal of Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe was met with a decent reception, NetherRealm­ decided to reach back and recapture the trademark grit that had made it a household name almost 20 years earlier, spawning a live-action movie franchise, a short-lived TV series, and a platinum-selling soundtrack. “With this reinvention of Mortal Kombat, we wanted to be darker and more violent, and get back to the roots of it and what the fans actually love about it,” asserts Steve Beran, art director at NetherRealm Studios.

Boon affirms it seemed time to approach the game’s signature action with a straighter face. “One of the goals that we set out with was to turn the dial a little closer toward the serious,” he says. Still, the vibe of the ninth core chapter in the Mortal Kombat series isn’t that of a funeral home — there’s still a healthy dose of humor, especially in the fake movie billboards and Johnny Cage’s quips. But nothing’s watered down, and that’s partially thanks to today’s gaming world. NetherRealm didn’t have to spend a lot of time thinking about what parents groups it might offend by revisiting the ultra-violence that made Mortal Kombat such a hot topic in the mid-’90s.

Back when the original Mortal Kombat started popping up in arcades, its boundries-pushing graphics represented something new and dangerous, and its popularity just increased further once it hit home consoles. In fact, Mortal Kombat was so controversial that it almost single-handedly prompted the Congressional hearings that eventually led to the ESRB’s founding in 1994.

“It’s night and day,” Boon declares of the change in atmosphere for games. “The biggest differences are, first, there was no ratings system back in the day, so people didn’t know what to do with Mortal Kombat or how to categorize or handle content like that. And second, there wasn’t as much competition. Right now, with Mortal Kombat coming out — it’s violent, but games like Gears of War, God of War, and a bunch of others are up there with us.”

Deeper Kombat

Part of recapturing the series’ violent tone was introducing the new X-Ray moves, which let fighters unleash incredible attacks that shatter bones and cause intense pain — all of which is shown in glorious, slow-motion detail in the middle of a match. Boon first pitched select members of his team on the idea during the closing crunch period for DC Universe. “I called it ‘internal damage’ at the time,” he notes. “I said, ‘I want to see bones breaking and organs being smashed.’”

However, bringing the move set to life in the midst of a fast-paced battle was a lot to ask for — and the team wasn’t fully convinced it could be executed successfully. “At the time it sounded amazingly cool,” admits Beran. “But to be honest, I said, ‘There’s no way in hell we’d ever get that to happen, technically,’ because it’s really, really complicated.”

Luckily, they pulled it off; and by associating it with the use of a maxed-out super meter, NetherRealm made the X-Ray moves look and feel spectacular. The addition of the meter was also indicative of a shift toward deeper, more varied gameplay — part of an attempt to make the game more appealing to hardcore and tournament players, while still keeping it approachable for newcomers and casual fighting fans.

“We’ve always first and foremost tried to be an accessible fighter, and it was basically just adding layers of complexity,” says Boon. Beyond X-Ray moves, the super meter allows access to combo breakers and more powerful attacks. “Some of those concepts aren’t new to the hardcore fighting-game guys, but incorporating them into Mortal Kombat was the way that we added that level of depth while maintaining what we already had, which is something where special moves are easier to perform and don’t require as much precision.”

For Singles

Another shocking feature in the new Mortal Kombat is just how much content caters to the solo player, which remains the exception, not the rule, in the fighting genre even today. Most notable is a lengthy story mode that expands upon the same idea from Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe; it essentially inserts you into an interactive movie that alternates between cinematics and fights. Boon believes the team “executed it better” the second time around, and we’d certainly agree, as the experience made the oft-confusing series lore seem both logical and consistently entertaining.

As with story mode, Mortal Kombat’s lengthy Challenge Tower mode — which offers hundreds of brief single-player missions that most players will complete over a series of sessions (Boon calls it a “long project you can work on”) — addresses a concern the team had noticed in the fighting community. “We always had a theory that one of the reasons fighting games haven’t had the presence that they had in the past was because the whole arcade and social element played such a big part in the formula of their success,” states Boon. “When you eliminated that, the reality is a lot of people play videogames by themselves. To offer them only a progressive ladder of opponents and a boss battle at the end — it didn’t seem enough for today’s market.”

But NetherRealm certainly wasn’t willing to discard the social appeal of Mortal Kombat, either. In addition to four-player local tag-team battles, the game introduces an online King of the Hill mode — a variation on Street Fighter’s Quarter Match system, in which players watch and queue up for fights, albeit with the ability to make gestures with your Xbox Live Avatars in the waiting room.

“King of the Hill was pretty much Ed Boon’s idea from the start,” notes Alan Villani, director of technology at NetherRealm. “Ed’s design goal was to relive the experience of taunting and waiting in line, and putting your quarters up on the machine — looking over a guy’s shoulder and seeing what he’s doing. That was the initial [inspiration].”

To Be Kontinued

Though Boon says the studio is “definitely exploring other opportunities” beyond the fighting genre, NetherRealm plans to continue supporting Mortal Kombat with downloadable content for the foreseeable future. And it shouldn’t be terribly long before we see the team tackle another entry.

It’s just now, given the “quality over quantity” mantra, coupled with the team’s even stronger commitment to putting out a fantastic game, fans won’t see it happen overnight.

“We’re going to at least have a conversation about a sequel, but we certainly haven’t started or planned out anything,” offers Boon. “I would love to see another one come out in the not-too-distant future. At the same time, I personally wouldn’t want to release one really fast — like next year — because I think you can oversaturate [the market], especially having released a game that’s doing exceptionally well. I would really want to give it time to breathe.”

Read on to learn about the future of this iconic fighter!

Fresh Fatalities

After nearly two decades, the Mortal Kombat makers are still coming up with all sorts of shocking and inventive fatality maneuvers. Boon says the team has pitch meetings to brainstorm such moves, but that one-upmanship often yields excessive results. “People invariably come up with ones that are unthinkable,” he admits. “Like, we wouldn’t even entertain the idea of putting them in there.” (When asked for an example of a fatality that wasn’t included in the game, NetherRealm declined to comment.)

But with fatality planning occurring much earlier than usual during the development process of the newest Mortal Kombat, the team had more time to refine and polish the selection this time around, according to Beran: “As a result, I think we have some of the best fatalities we’ve ever had.” Can’t say we disagree.

Choose Your Fighter

With dozens of characters created over the course of previous Mortal Kombat games, it must have been difficult to choose just 27 for the final game…right? “It was easy,” asserts Boon. “We knew from the beginning that we wanted to retell the story of [the original Mortal Kombat trilogy], so naturally we decided to use just the cast of those games as our roster. We set our lineup from the very beginning of the game.”

Updating the characters to match the times and technology required a lot of work and revisions, though. “When you look at the version of Sonya or Scorpion from the first Mortal Kombat, it’s almost laughable how simple their costumes were,” says Beran. “You have to give fans the recognizability of their favorite characters, but make it not look like Sonya’s wearing a leotard and workout clothes.”

Background Komeback

In updating classic levels from the older entries, the art team at NetherRealm had to pick and choose from fan favorites — places like Goro’s Lair and The Pit — and then figure out how to modernize their designs. “It was pretty easy to decide – they’re almost a part of pop culture, [and] people know those backgrounds pretty well,” says Beran. “It was cool taking something as simple as Shang Tsung’s palace from the first game and totally reinventing it.”