Consider This from NPR - How Mortal Kombat Konquered Gaming

Episode Date: September 29, 2023

When the video game Mortal Kombat released in 1992, it took arcades — and later the American home — by storm. Thirty years on, the franchise is still going strong. NPR's Scott Detrow faces off against co-host Juana Summers in the latest version of the game, Mortal Kombat 1, and speaks with co-creator Ed Boon. Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu slash forward. When writer David Craddock was 10 years old, he walked into an arcade with his dad. We're going into the arcade where I would normally play games like Golden Axe, Final Fight, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And when I got into the arcade, right at the entrance, there was this mob of people surrounding an arcade cabinet.

The crowd was so thick, you actually couldn't see what game it was. And on that screen, I look up, and I thought I was looking at a martial arts movie. I saw the screen go dark, and I saw one punch his hand through the opponent's chest and rip out his heart. Kano wins. Fatality.

And that was when my dad, who was standing behind me, goes, nope, nope, nope, nope, and escorted me out of the arcade. That game? 1992's Mortal Kombat. A video game that quickly became known for its over-the-top violence. It took arcades, and later American homes by storm.

Suddenly parents were going to go out and buy this cartridge and let their kids rip out hearts and pull off heads in the living room. Soon it grabbed the attention of members of Congress, like Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. Like the Grinch who stole Christmas, these violent video games threatened to rob this particular holiday season of a spirit of goodwill. But more than being just a lightning rod for moral outrage, Mortal Kombat became a pop culture phenomenon with comic books, toys, movies.

It's not just a great fighting game. It is actually the best-selling fighting game franchise of all time. Consider this. 30 years on, millions are still playing Mortal Kombat. A new version's out now. We talked to one of Mortal Kombat's creators about how he survived the initial controversy and went on to build one of the biggest video game franchises of all time. From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow. It's Friday, September 29th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com.

T's and C's apply. This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University drives discovery, innovation, and creative endeavors to solve some of society's greatest challenges. Groundbreaking investments in neuroscience, climate change, Alzheimer's research, and cybersecurity mean IU sets new standards to move the world forward, unlocking cures and solutions that lead to a better future for all. More at iu.edu slash forward. This message comes from Pushkin. In a new episode of the Revisionist History Podcast, how a right-wing organization tried to take over the Parent Teacher Association in the 1960s.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts. It's Consider This from NPR. Last week, I was dismembered by my co-host, Juana Summers. Could really use that in real life. Love this. Okay. I'm going to describe that you just kicked through my chest and my spine.

I think I just drove two fans into Scott's skull. That was very satisfying. This little bout of bloody competition in the new Mortal Kombat game happened right here in the All Things Considered office. But back in the day when Mortal Kombat first came out, these kinds of battles happened in rowdy, crowded arcades. And Mortal Kombat's signature violence was just one way the game differentiated itself from all the others.

Part of the over-the-top violence, not just the blood, but, you know, uppercutting someone and knocking them 20 feet into the air, was a way to kind of catch your attention. No different than Killer Instinct a couple years later with that announcer who would shout, I'll drop combat! Operators would crank the volume up to 11 because they wanted you to be across the arcade and go, oh, what's that? And kind of make your way over to the games. That's writer David Craddock, who you heard from earlier. His book, Long Live Mortal Kombat, chronicles the history and legacy of the

series. In fact, he's been writing about the game for a while now. My first paid writing job was as a sixth grader. My mom got me the strategy guide. I went to our school's computer lab. I typed up all the fatalities, printed out like 50 copies and sold them for a quarter each. All these years later, he's still writing and thinking about it. The game still has those fatalities. Fatality. But in a lot of other ways, it's changed. For example, new Mortal Kombat games aren't released in the arcades. Serious competition happens elsewhere,

in big online arenas at esports events that draw tens of thousands of viewers. And that's going to be it! The breakaway is used! And the grab seals the deal! Ninja Killer has done what no MK11 player has ever done before! Wasima Belmoussi became a fan of Mortal Kombat at a tournament in the Netherlands. I was thinking first, like, oh, am I getting accepted as, like, a girl, a woman?

So for me, it was, like, really hard to make a choice. But then I was like, hey, I need friends who, like, share the same interests and passion and stuff. And she found that in the competitive Mortal Kombat scene. Yeah, it was, like, one of the most fun experiences in my life. Now, better known by her handle LostyGirl, she plays the game on the streaming service Twitch. It isn't just the competitive scene that's grabbed the attention of newer Mortal Kombat players like her, though. It's the game's story, which has 30 years of lore to draw from now. Dalmousi says her favorite character is Mileena, often a villain in the series and often pit against her own sister, Katana. But in the latest release, called Mortal

Kombat 1, that relationship has changed. A mother is only trying to protect you, sister. I was always dreaming about Melina and her sister Kitana being like besties. I was so glad, like, oh my gosh, they made my dream come true. That's just one of the ways co-creator Ed Boon is trying to continue to engage fans.

Ed Boon, get over here. I'm already there. That was a polite laugh. I'll take it. We asked him how he went from making pinball games to building a multi-generational franchise. In 1986, I went for an interview with a company called Williams Electronics, and I was under the impression that it was for a video game programmer. And at the interview, I was kind of learned that it was for a pinball programmer. And so I joined kind of with the hopes that eventually I could move over to the video game department. And that's exactly what happened. I programmed pinball games for about three years and then joined the video game department after that. What were the original conversations like? Like, what was the first idea? What were you trying to do when you first started thinking up, uh, what became Mortal Kombat? This was in 1991 and, uh, a game called Street Fighter 2 had come out, uh, right. It was,

you know, it's a similar kind of format to fighters, basically an arena fighting. More sonic booms, fewer scorpion throws. Exactly. And they had kind of like an anime art style, right? It was hand-drawn. Our main focus was with digitized graphics, right? Like we would point a camera at a person and record them doing a motion, and that's how we would make our sprites, our animations. And we were thinking, you know, I bet you if we did a photorealistic version of a fighting

game, like Karate Champ or Street Fighter or whatnot, we can really stand out visually. That was basically the base conversation that started that. When did you first realize how big of a hit it was? Is there a particular moment that sticks in your head of like, whoa, we made it. This is a thing. It wasn't until the next year

that Acclaim Entertainment pulled me aside at a consumer electronics show. And they put in a videotape and it was basically the commercial, the TV commercial, that famous one

of the kids yelling Mortal Kombat in the streets of New York. the commercial, the TV commercial, that famous one of the kids yelling, you know, Mortal Kombat in the streets of New York. They said something like, we're going to put $10 million in the marketing of this game. It's going to be the biggest thing ever. And I remember saying to them, you know, hey, I think you might be over-investing in this, you know, and kind of assuming it's going to be bigger than it is. And I could not have been more wrong. What are the biggest differences in creating a video game now compared to back then?

I mean, obviously, the technology is exponentially different. The platforms are exponentially more powerful. It's so much more part of the culture than it was back then. How does that all change how you start thinking about the planning and the production and the scripting and all of that? What are the biggest differences? Well, you hit that nail on the head. The technology is exponentially bigger. But in addition, the scope of the game is exponentially bigger. To give you an idea, the first Mortal Kombat game was four people doing the entire game. And it was just one programmer, myself, two graphic artists, John Tobias and a guy named John Vogel, and an audio composer, engineer, a guy named Dan Ford.

He's the guy who pokes his head out and says toasty in the game nine-year-old me would have demanded that i ask you like what why what what was the backstory on the toasty guy at the time that we did mortal kombat 2 we realized how effective uh hidden features in the games were. You know, mysteries, basically. You know, what is that? What's that character standing there? So with Mortal Kombat 2, Dan Forden, the audio engineer,

he used to say, he used to use the phrase toasty all the time. And so I thought it would be funny when you do an uppercut to make his head come out and say it would just make the player go what the hell was that could you if you put in a certain cheat could you get to the final level if you put it in when he said toasty because that was the hot rumor in school and i never knew if it was true because i could never get it right what you could do was if when the Toasty guy came out, if you held I think you held down on the joystick

and you hit the start button, then a secret fight with a character, Smoke, would come up. I tried so many times. Yeah, that was undocumented. Again, a lot of the secrets that we put, we never documented. We never told people how to do it. It just became a seemingly random event that would just get somebody talking and go run to their friends and say, I swear I saw this. So the hot rumor at lunch was you get to the final level.

I'm glad that you're a fact check. That's right. You know, one of the storylines of this all along, at least in the real world, is the various ways that people have reacted to the violence over time. Mortal Kombat was right in the middle of kind of culture war, panic moments of congressional hearings and in the middle of political campaigns and things like that. What was that experience like for you? What did you make of that time? You know, video games were maturing and there was no rating system. And that was the main

objection, right? You had this violent game coming out and there was no rating system like, you know, you'd see explicit lyrics label on a on a cd and so that was the kind of the uproar that had happened and we were like yeah that makes sense and by the time mortal kombat 2 came along the rating system esrb had come along and uh we were rated m for mature and ever since then that whole issue has been, you know, really not really there. But of course, for so many players, the violence is the appeal. And it's not just just violence. It's cartoonish, over the top, finishing moves. You know, it's so violent, it's funny in a way at the end. What are the pitch meetings like? Like, how do you come up with the fatalities

and the moves like that for the next version of the game? What, how do those conversations even start? You know, we have to come up with, you know, 40, 50 fatalities per game. So it's not like one person comes up with them. It's pretty much a committee. There's a committee of team members, anybody who really wants to attend. And they sit around and they throw out ideas. And the ones that resonate with the group are usually, okay, let's storyboard that out and see how it looks. And then they'll send it to me. And then I'll either say, no, no, no, we're not going to

do that. That's for sure. Or I'll say, okay, yeah, let's do this, but let's punctuate this moment. Let's do that. Who's your favorite Mortal Kombat character? Scorpion. And you do the voice, right? Yeah, yeah. Oddly, I have the Guinness Book of World Records of the longest voice representing a video game character. I just edged out Mario by like four months or something crazy like that.

And I think he just retired, so you can expand that record. He did. He did. I actually felt bad when I read that. Scorpion wins. What do you hope the lasting legacy of Mortal Kombat is or will be? The lasting legacy well it's probably unrealistic but i'd like to think that its legacy is going to be something similar to dc comics or marvel comics or something you know the star wars right and an ensemble type of license that has tons of characters, all of which could be spun off into their own thing.

Some people call it a forever franchise, right? Like you're never going to say, okay, well, that's the last, you know, DC comics we're ever going to read. There's an assumption that DC will always be around. And I'm hoping that Mortal Kombat is eventually put into that category where there's always an assumption that it's going to be around. And I'm hoping that Mortal Kombat is eventually put into that category where there's always an assumption that it's going to be around. That's Ed Boon, co-creator of Mortal Kombat. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me.

And this Consider This has been finished. Finish him!