{"id":8144,"date":"2022-10-07T16:19:28","date_gmt":"2022-10-07T16:19:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.bwgamespot.com\/index.php\/2022\/10\/07\/ed-boon-talks-30-years-of-mortal-kombat\/"},"modified":"2022-10-07T16:19:28","modified_gmt":"2022-10-07T16:19:28","slug":"ed-boon-talks-30-years-of-mortal-kombat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.bwgamespot.com\/index.php\/2022\/10\/07\/ed-boon-talks-30-years-of-mortal-kombat\/","title":{"rendered":"Ed Boon talks 30 years of Mortal Kombat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ed Boon is practically gaming royalty. He\u2019s been a working designer since the late 80s, starting with pinball and quickly moving to arcade games. And then he and three other folks created Mortal Kombat, and the rest is history.<\/p>\n

The legendary fighting series hits the big 3-0 tomorrow, a date that marks the release of the original Mortal Kombat arcade cabinets on October 8, 1992. And Boon has worked on Mortal Kombat for every one of those 30 years, a highly unusual feat in video game design.<\/p>\n

To celebrate the occasion, I caught up with the affable creator, now Chief Creative Officer for Mortal Kombat & NetherRealm Studios, to talk about his deep roots with the series, reminisce on his career developing MK, and try to get a sense of where it goes from here.<\/p>\n

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PlayStation.Blog: Where does 2022 find Mortal Kombat?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ed Boon: Well, it finds it celebrating 30 years of being around, being in the public eye. Obviously\u2026we haven\u2019t made the last one. I guess that\u2019s probably the closest I can say without revealing too much.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The biggest surprise for me is that players have come along and stayed with us for so long. And so the fact that they\u2019ve stuck with us all this time really invigorates us with each iteration of the game.<\/p>\n

PSB: With Mortal Kombat turning 30, are you reflecting on your life and how it intersects with the series?<\/strong><\/p>\n

EB: Not so much of my life, but certainly on my career making games. Mortal Kombat is kind of like different forms of school for me now. The arcade days were like grade school, and the 3D games were, you know, middle school or high school.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And now the most recent games \u2014 Mortal Kombat 9, MKX, and MK11 \u2014 are kind of like college or graduate school. I think of my career as different chapters because it\u2019s been so long. And we\u2019ve been doing the games pretty consistently, over those 30 years, right? We didn\u2019t stop and take a 10-year break and then come back.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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PSB: Are there other anniversaries that you celebrate, outside of the first game\u2019s original arcade release date?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

EB: I certainly celebrate the arcade game release. But there are different anniversaries. For instance, 1991 is when we started working on the game, when it was a Van Damme game and all that.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And then next year will be the 30th anniversary of Mortal Monday, the marketing campaign Acclaim created. They did an amazing job, really elevated Mortal Kombat to a new level of exposure. And I think it\u2019s been 20 years since Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, right? I think for the next several years we\u2019re going to be having a round number anniversary for some version or another of Mortal Kombat.<\/p>\n

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PSB: If you could travel back in time and give yourself one piece of advice while you were working on the original Mortal Kombat, what might it be?<\/strong><\/p>\n

EB: Don\u2019t work so many hours? When you\u2019re in your twenties you have almost unlimited energy. But at the same time, I don\u2019t think I would have listened to myself back then. We were so driven. We were so motivated to do something special. And with each new thing that we saw, that we put into the game, and seeing people react to it\u2026 that just charged us that much more so there was no, there was no stopping us at that point. We were self-motivated. We were just on a mission.<\/p>\n

PSB: And that original Mortal Kombat arcade game came together in less than a year, right?<\/strong><\/p>\n

EB: Yes, about eight months total. Yeah.\u00a0<\/p>\n

PSB: Mortal Kombat co-creator John Tobias recently shared a look at the creation of the game\u2019s famous dragon logo. Are there any stories about the series that you\u2019ve wanted to tell, but somehow no interviews ever touched upon?<\/strong><\/p>\n

EB: Definitely there are. And I\u2019ve been trying to tell those stories on social media, showing some of the videotaping<\/a> that we had done capturing the actors performing the moves. And there\u2019s, you know\u2026 I\u2019m certainly entertaining the idea of writing some kind of a book or something like that when I have time. Because there are hundreds of stories that have happened over the years. Every once in a while you remember one of them and you\u2019re like, \u201cOh, that\u2019s right!\u201d You know? Because it\u2019s been 30 years.<\/p>\n

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