Jesse will be pleased to know that Mortal Kombat, regardless of how you spell it, will not be ditching its trademark finishing moves entirely; they’re just being “modified” to be a little less crazy, bloody, rip-your-skin-off violent.
GameTap has an excellent interview with Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon, in which Boon corrects the general assumption that fatalities were out, as well as explaining other limitations of the Midway-DC Comics partnership. According to Boon, there was never any intention to remove finishing moves from the game:
There was never any statement on our part that fatalities will be gone or that finishing moves will be gone. We did acknowledge that we won’t be able to do the same kinds of outrageous moves, like tearing someone’s head off and the spine being attached to it. But there are a lot of assumptions that there will be no blood in the game, that there are no fatalities in the game. It’s an assumption that, because the DC characters will be in there, those features will have to be dropped. My response is that, no, we’re modifying fatalities. But I have every intention to keep finishers. You know, to let gamers do a really cool secret button combination and follow with a really outrageous finishing move to end the match. The names of these moves, and the level of violence we use, are to be determined. But it’s certainly not a feature we plan on eliminating from the series.
GameTap: OK, so there will be fatalities and blood, but they just won’t be as violent as in the past.
Ed Boon: Yes. I certainly can’t speak with authority as to what DC will permit. There will certainly be some limitations. But my intention is that we want to push the envelope of a T-rated game as far as we can without being an M-rated game.
Regardless of whether Midway is allowed to keep its spinal column with regards to MK vs. DC, the portion of the interview where Boon details how DC superheroes and villains are being chosen, and how Batman and Superman are being portrayed in particular, is not to be missed.
Read the full interview here.
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