‘Mortal Kombat 1’ Creator Got Megan Fox But Still Pines for John Wick

By all accounts, Ed Boon is just a regular guy. Chicago-raised, he loves shlocky Eighties action flicks and the music of Prince. Like everyone else, he’s racing to catch up on Succession but it’s tough to fit into his busy work schedule. His work just happens to be leading development for the latest installment of Mortal Kombat, one of the most influential game series of all time – not just for its impact on gaming, but for its three decades worth of symbiosis with our culture.

Developed in 1991 before its initial 1992 arcade release, Mortal Kombat was the brainchild of just four dudes: co-creators Ed Boon and John Tobias, artist John Vogel, and composer/audio programmer Dan Forden. Working together in Chicago, they took their love of Bloodsport and tried to turn it into the coolest video game they had ever seen. It worked – almost too well – as the game swept arcades across the U.S. just a year after Street Fighter II opened the door. But once it hit homes on Nintendo and Sega consoles, it was quickly caught up in a culture war on violence in media, stepping beyond fame into infamy.

The game and its signature gory gameplay and aesthetic are often credited as the reason for the creation of the ESRB (Entertainment Software Ratings Board). Having an entire rating system built around it, Mortal Kombat had gone full Temple of Doom.

Having weathered the storm of moral panic, as well the death of arcades, the bumpy transition from the 2D to 3D eras, and multiple Hollywood adaptations of varying quality, Mortal Kombat has remained a constant force throughout its three-decade lifespan. And unlike most creators from the Nineties, Ed Boon is still steering the ship, having personally led development on all twelve of the mainline Mortal Kombat games.

The latest iteration, Mortal Kombat 1, is the second “timeline reboot” for the series after 2011’s Mortal Kombat (the ninth game), which kicked off the series’ most financially lucrative and creatively bonkers era since its inception. (Seriously, it’s the only game on the market where you can pit a vampiric Megan Fox against Nineties-era Jean-Claude Van Damme in a blood-soaked deathmatch).

And for Boon, it’s yet another opportunity to make the coolest video game he’s ever seen.

Rolling Stone recently sat down with Boon to look back on the early days of the franchise, coming full circle on JCVD, and how the one man who still eludes him is John Wick.

We think of Mortal Kombat as this huge cultural thing, but the first game was developed in ’91 by just four twenty-something dudes from Chicago. Did you feel like rock stars after that?
Oh, we were not feeling like rock stars. As a matter of fact, we were making arcade games at the time, so we would release an arcade game and then the next year it would come out for the home systems. When Mortal Kombat (one) came out for the Super Nintendo and Genesis the next year, we were heads down intensely busy working on Mortal Kombat II for the arcades. I almost feel like – at least me – I missed some of the hype. And the same when Mortal Kombat II came out for the home, we were heads down working on Mortal Kombat 3, and then 4.

Part of Mortal Kombat’s fame was its infamy. There were congressional hearings about the game’s violence, and they literally built the ESRB rating system because of you guys. Was it almost a badge of honor?
It certainly wasn’t like we set out to upset people and we did it, so “bucket list acquired.” [But] you give four guys in their 20s free rein to make whatever game they want, and they grew up on actions movies of the Seventies, Eighties? Guys are gonna do that. But when all the attention was happening, honestly, I immediately saw the parallels with comic books, movies, explicit lyrics in music. [It] was consistent to me; they were fighting for a label on music and they were fighting for a label on video games, and that was a legitimate thing to have. Games were maturing. We don’t want a six-year-old playing our game.

Working now on the twelfth iteration of this game, 30-plus years after the first, what is the internal studio culture like at NetherRealm Studios among developers of different generations?
I credit that [as] one of the reasons why we’ve been able to keep the game relevant all these years. Thirty-two years ago, there was a different mindset from players now who are in their 20s. [They] have a completely different set of priorities and tastes. A lot of the stuff that we put in our more recent games has been a result of ideas from the generation after us. I think that it’s a big part of why our last three games have been our highest-selling, even more than the very first ones.

With those three games [Mortal Kombat [2011], MK X, and MK 11], the series has had a hell of a decade, but it feels like everyone else is catching up. Do you think we’re in a renaissance period for fighting games?
I know that’s been talked about a lot. I personally think it has more to do with the fact that the big three: Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, and Tekken – this is the first time in a decade or something where all three games have come out within a year window of each other. When you hit the big three all coming out, there’s certainly going to be an assumption of a renaissance. It’s a good time to be a fighting game player.

What do you like about those games [Street Fighter and Tekken]?
The pacing is different. Tekken always had really smooth animations; I thought that was of their strongest things. They had these crazy 10-hit combos, which are always fun to watch. Hard to memorize, but fun to watch. Street Fighter was always a little tighter. I’ve always been a Tekken and Street Fighter [fan]. I think those are my favorite two – other than Mortal Kombat.

Mortal Kombat has a unique relationship with pop culture and celebrity characters. The game’s original premise was based on Jean-Claude Van Damme, but it took over 30 years to get him in the game [in Mortal Kombat 1)]. Was he your white whale?
He definitely [was]. He is probably the one that we went to the well the most [for] and got the answer “no” the most, and then finally got him for this game. There’s something poetic about it. It’s Mortal Kombat 1, it’s the first game, it’s what we wanted to do in the first game, and we finally got him. Honestly, we’ve been crazy fortunate in the sense that we’ve had the big, heavy hitters – Terminator, Alien, Predator, Robocop, Rambo – and then all the horror ones: Jason [Voorhees], Texas Chainsaw [Leatherface], and just… Freddy Krueger! I don’t even know if I can list one off the top of my head that we wanted to get and they said no, and that was it. At the same time, we haven’t even tried to get, like, Scooby Doo. They just don’t match. I’m sure if we tried, they’d say, “No, we don’t want to get Scooby Doo’s head cut off.”

So, you basically make JCVD: The Game and he declines to appear. Then, two years later he ends up in the Street Fighter movie. What was your reaction to that?
It was so long ago, I’m not even… [pauses]. Well, I’ll say it nicely: I don’t think that was the greatest film in the world. I think it had novelty and it was almost like purposefully cheesy? Part of it, I couldn’t tell if it was trying to be cheesy or if it was trying to take itself seriously and they didn’t hit the mark. So if it had been this huge hit, I think we probably would have felt a certain amount of, “Oh man, this should have been us.” But it wasn’t.

And just a year later, you’d have your own movie that was much better received.
The first one was a big learning experience for me. I had seen really early cuts with no music, missing some sound effects, missing added effects that would enhance things. And I kind of judged it based on that and had low expectations for it. But then they put everything together and it turned out way better than I would have predicted. And that, to me, just shows that I shouldn’t be making movies. I wasn’t crazy about the second one, Annihilation.

The series has always been steeped in Seventies and Eighties action cinema. Are you being influenced at all by modern action cinema now?
When we were making Mortal Kombat (1992), the whole team was in the midst of Bloodsport, Enter the Dragon, and all the Terminator movies. I could certainly see the John Wicks of the world… as a matter of fact, that is one of the ones that we tried to get – John Wick – in Mortal Kombat, and we didn’t get it.

Wow, I think that’s what everyone has been waiting for. John Wick or just Keanu. But to that point, why did you decide to go fully meta and bring in JCVD as himself, as an alternative skin to Johnny Cage rather than just cast him as Johnny Cage for the game?
One of the things that I entertained with this game – and this is the 10 out of 10 version – which we didn’t do, was, “What if every character in this game was played by an actor?” Like we got Keanu Reeves to play Kenshi… this is, like, pipe dream. We’re not even thinking of their salaries and all that stuff. What if we made a game that had an actor, a famous, recognizable actor play every character and Johnny Cage was absolutely the one who would have been played by Jean-Claude Van Damme. So, the thought did come to us. But at some point, I don’t know if he would have wanted to do motion-capture work, or if he [says], “Just scan my face and have somebody else do all the whatever stuff.” There are hundreds of lines of dialogue that they have to read. A lot of actors don’t realize just how sophisticated video games are. When you sign up for it, you’re not just signing up to go in one day, be in the recording studio for an hour, and you’re done. It’s like a real acting job.

The first thing you noticed about Mortal Kombat 1 is that it’s a little bit… lighter? Was that the goal in giving the franchise and characters a fresh start?
Yeah, it was. If you look at the color palettes between Mortal Kombat X and Mortal Kombat 1, it’s night and day; it’s both ends of the spectrum.

Is that where you are in life? Is it a sign of the times?
Well, that’s true too [Laughs]. Things had gotten so… you know, we had 11 games of evil, more evil, more evil, more evil, and so at some point we’re like, “OK, we’ve hit a ceiling. Let’s reset things and start [again] in the Garden of Eden.”

Mortal Kombat 1’s premium edition is now available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC. The standard edition launches on September 19.

From Rolling Stone US.