Mortal Kombat’s co-creator breaks down the franchise’s story
Covering the ins and outs of Mortal Kombat’s story, franchise co-creator, Ed Boon, explained why he and the team at NetherRealm Studios took a different approach with 2023 release Mortal Kombat 1.
We get started however at the beginning of the franchise with the 1992 release of Mortal Kombat in arcades, while progressing through the franchise to the latest game.
“The story was just really a couple of paragraphs, and then you’d see the character do a Kata or something, and then there was an ending,” Boon said about the very first entry in the franchise from the 1990s.
“What I think a lot of people didn’t realize is a lot of people filled in the rest of the story with their imagination. We made them a little more elaborate in Mortal Kombat 2, but we didn’t get into telling a really deep story until 4 or 5 games down the line, where we had endings that were more animated and what not,” Boon said.
“There was certainly a mystery element to the lore, because there was so little information, that just caused so much more speculation. We didn’t choose to do that,” Boon noted.
“As far as the characters not being in a certain game, for production reasons we couldn’t include all of the characters, so we didn’t have Sonya and Kano in Mortal Kombat 2. The story basically just was like ‘This is why you’re not seeing this character’ and everybody was like said ‘OK, that makes a lot of sense’,” Boon added.
“Mortal Kombat vs. DC was the first game where we actually had the cinematic story that would play, and we were putting fights in between the story, but with Mortal Kombat 9, it was real exciting because we hired real actors. It was very much like making a movie,” Boon stated.
“Mortal Kombat 11 was obviously the eleventh installment in terms of advancing the story, so when we started it was Shang Tsung, and you find out he has a boss, Shao Kahn, and we kept layering bosses with each game,” Boon said.
“Each game we wanted it to be bigger stakes, so more threatening and bigger bosses,” he relayed.
“We had done a time jump forward in Mortal Kombat X, all the characters were 25 years older, they had kids and what not,” he stated.
“When we reached Kronika, we had gotten so grand and so big, that we were like ‘We just can’t think of [someone even bigger] looking down over all of that’,” Boon elaborated.
“Liu Kang had won, and he had become the new Fire God, and we thought ‘You know what, let’s try to scale down’ but at the same time we also wanted to plant the seed, like we did in Mortal Kombat 11, that there are many Mortal Kombats, in some of them Shang Tsung won, and in some Liu Kang won, and there was a crossing of those two in Mortal Kombat 1,” said Boon.
“So the main reason we reset is because it had gotten so big, that we thought the only direction to go now is to shrink it down again,” concluded Boon.
This is a pretty interesting overview of Mortal Kombat’s story, and it explains a lot of the decisions that went into making the franchise what it is today.
You can find more of this interview created by the Evo staff in the embedded video below.
Also, you can find more news about Mortal Kombat on our official story page for the game, along with Ed Boon explaining what the core elements are to the franchise.
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