The Mortal Kombat started development in 1991 with only four people:
Ed Boon,
John Tobias,
John Vogel and Dan Forden.
[21] 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"
[22] 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.
[23] Intending to make a game based on the Van Damme film
Bloodsport, Boon and Tobias decided to continue their project even after the deal to use the film license fell through, even basing one of their developed characters,
Johnny Cage, on Van Damme himself.
[2][24]
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."
Graphics
In the original of
Mortal Kombat was developed with digitized sprites based on actors, as opposed to animated cartoon graphics.
Mortal Kombat 4 brought the series into 3D, replacing the digitized fighters of previous games with polygon models.
More so than other fighting games at the time,
Mortal Kombat was famous for re-coloring certain sprites to appear as different characters. This was most prominent with the series' various ninja/assassin characters. Many of the more popular characters were spawned from these palette swaps.
In the first game,
Scorpion,
Sub-Zero, and
Reptile were essentially the same character. The colors of their attire, fighting stance, and special techniques indicated the difference. Sub-Zero wore blue attire, Scorpion wore yellow, and Reptile wore green.
Later games added other ninjas based on the same model, as well as several female ninja color swap characters initially also using just one base model (since
Mortal Kombat II). All of them gradually became very different characters in the following installments of the series.
Miscellaneous
The Mortal Kombat included secret characters, secret games, and other
Easter eggs.
Mortal Kombat 3, for example, included a hidden game of
Galaga[18] as well as a hidden game of
Pong in
Mortal Kombat II.
Many extras in the series have only been accessible through very challenging, demanding, and sometimes coincidental requirements. The
Sega Mega Drive/Genesis versions had some unique eggs: in
Mortal Kombat, a head shot of the President of Probe Software, Fergus McGovern, flew in front of the moon in the Pit stage, while in
Mortal Kombat II, Raiden could perform a "Fergality" on the Armory stage. The Sega
Mega CD version also contained an additional code (known as the "Dad's Code"), which changed the names of the fighters to that of characters from the classic
BBC comedy series
Dad's Army.
In the
1992 arcade original when fighting on The Pit stage, the player can qualify for a fight at the bottom of The Pit with the hidden character
Reptile, who has the powers of Scorpion and Sub-Zero.
[33]
! Some Easter eggs originated from
in-jokes between members of the development team. One example is "Toasty", which found its way into the game in the form of a small image of sound designer Dan Forden, who would appear in the corner of the screen during gameplay (after performing an
uppercut) and yell the word "Toasty". This egg was also the key to unlocking the hidden character
Smoke when it happened in the Portal stage.
Another note of interest is in
Mortal Kombat 4, Forden would say "Toasty! 3D!" after Scorpion did his burn fatality, a reference to the fact that it is the first 3D game of the series. "Toasty" is also found in
Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, appearing randomly after the character pulls off a chain of hits, though the picture of Forden was removed for that version.
Toasty is also included in Mortal Kombat for the PlayStation Vita. It is a power-up that triggers a torrent of body parts in the "Test Your Slice" minigame. "Toasty" also appears in Mortal Kombat (9). Yet another private joke was the hidden character "
Noob Saibot", who appeared in various versions of the game. The character's name derived from two of the series' creators' surnames,
Ed Boon and
John Tobias, spelled backward.In addition, the character Ermac's name came from the first
Mortal Kombat, which had "ERMAC5" (Error Macro 5) on its diagnostics screen; players presumed this dealt with some secret character. The development team decided to turn this rumor into an actual character, who was introduced in
Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 as a secret character.
The character
Mokap is based upon
Carlos Pesina who leads the motion capture team for modern
MK games (and previously played Raiden in the first and second games).
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