Mortal Kombat is synonymous with violence -- hell, it's baked into the franchise's name. But despite how increasingly gruesome the series has become with each successive release throughout its 23-year history, it hasn't lost sight of keeping the tone light as a counterbalance. Whether that's a head popping up saying, "Toasty!" in falsetto after a particularly brutal uppercut, or turning an opponent into a crying baby that slips on a puddle of frozen urine at the end of a match, humor is just as intrinsic to the game as its bloodshed. What the series delivers is cartoony, over-the-top violence akin to the B-movie horror of something like Peter Jackson's
Dead Alive. Fatalities,
Mortal Kombat's signature, end-of-match moves, are shockingly gory, for sure, but somehow developer NetherRealm keeps the game from feeling like torture porn.
"We're not out trying to make
Saw or a horror film," says NetherRealm Lead Designer John Edwards. "We don't take ourselves too seriously."
To understand where the series' newest installment,
Mortal Kombat X, gets its groin-exploding levels of violence from, though, you need to take a look at where it all started: the arcade.
Back in the early '90s, arcade games didn't have the multimillion-dollar ad campaigns afforded to modern releases, so to stand out from the crowd they needed to be bigger and louder than whatever cabinet was closest. "You have to hit people over the head with something that gets them to put a quarter in," says Dave Lang, CEO of
Divekick and
Killer Instinct developer
Iron Galaxy Studios.
Lang worked as the studio tech director at Midway Chicago,
MK's original developer, before
the company dissolved due to bankruptcy in 2009. As he tells it, humor was a key factor to all of the games that came out of the studio:
NFL Blitz,
NARC,
Revolution X,
NBA Jam and, yes,
Mortal Kombat.
