Mortal Kombat - Development History

Development History

Mortal Kombat started development in 1991 with only four people: Ed Boon, John Tobias, John Vogel and Dan Forden. As Ed Boon stated in an interview with Major Nelson, "The first Mortal Kombat game was 4 guys, literally, one programmer, myself (Boon), two graphics guys (Tobias and Vogel), and a sound guy (Forden) was the entire team, literally." Originally, Boon and Tobias wanted to create a video game starring actor and martial artist Jean-Claude Van Damme, with a digitized version of the action star fighting villains. Intending to make a game "a lot more hard edge, a little bit more serious, a little bit more like Enter the Dragon or Bloodsport" than Street Fighter II, Boon and Tobias decided to continue their project even after the deal to use the Bloodsport license fell through (one of their developed characters, Johnny Cage, was based on Van Damme himself).

Ed Boon stated for six out of the eight months while they were in production of Mortal Kombat, "nobody could come up with a name nobody didn't hate." Some of the names suggested were "Kumite", "Dragon Attack", "Death Blow", and even at one point, "Fatality". Someone had written down "combat" on the drawing board for the names in Ed Boon's office and someone wrote a K over the C, according to Ed Boon, "just to be kind of weird." Steve Ritchie, a pinball designer at that time, was sitting in Ed Boon's office and saw the word "Kombat" and said to Ed Boon, 'Why don't you name it Mortal Kombat?' and according to Ed Boon, that name "just stuck." The series itself commonly uses the letter "K" in place of "C" for words containing the hard C sound, thus misspelling them. According to Boon, during game development they usually spell the words correctly and change them later when the developers recognize an opportunity.

Regarding the influence of the film Big Trouble in Little China, Tobias wrote that although this movie "kind of Americanized my obsession for supernatural kung fu films from China, it was not my biggest influence. My biggest influences came from Tsui Hark films -- Zu Warriors & The Swordsman. We had to get them from bootleggers in Chgo's Chinatown." The team switched from digitized actors to motion capture technology (the quote is incorrectly referring to Midway as Acclaim): "To make the characters in video games more realistic, actors are being recruited to serve as models. Acclaim, the video-game company that made Mortal Kombat, has created a special 'motion capture studio' for this purpose. A martial-arts expert with as many as 100 electronic sensors taped to his body sends precise readings to a camera as he goes through his moves—running, jumping, kicking, punching. The action is captured, digitized and synthesized into a 'naked' wire-frame model stored in a computer. Those models can then be 'dressed' with clothing, facial expressions and other characteristics by means of a computer technique called texture mapping."