Enigma
Mortal
The folks at Game Informer sat down with Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon at the 2007 Midway Gamer's Day to talk more about the new direction of Mortal Kombat: Armageddon for the Wii and what the future holds for Mortal Kombat on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
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The Mortal Kombat master takes back what he said to us about not developing Mortal Kombat for Wii, and explains how the game works with Nintendo's system. Plus get some interesting new information about the next-gen all new Mortal Kombat game and when we'll most likely be playing it.
Game Informer: In our last interview, we talked quite a bit about the Wii and the fact that Mortal Kombat wouldn’t work on the Wii. Surprisingly, that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore…(laughs)
Ed Boon: I think my theory is that my initial impression was that it was going to be a challenge. You know, I mentioned 15 years of associating special moves and fatalities with away-towards-A, away-towards-Y, away-towards-B, high block, low block–you know, all that stuff. And then you suddenly give a guy–the analogy I’d always say was, “Use a steering wheel to do a fighting game.” You know, can you do it? I think my initial reaction was, wow, that’s going to be really tough. And there were challenges, but, once we got a correlation between motions, the big thing we discovered was that you go up-down with the Wii remote and your guy drops into the ground to teleport while you’re doing that downward motion. That really feels good. As you’re going down, your guy’s going down. If you go away and then towards, Scorpion throws his spear in the direction that you swing your Wii remote. Once we got that connection, we realized, “OK, this is the way to go,” and the other stuff just kind of fell into place. So yeah, I never said that. (laughs)
GI: Good answer. (laughs) Is this your team that’s working on it?
Boon: Our team’s main focus right now is the next-gen game that we’re doing. The game is being developed in California–a company called JGI–they’re a really great group of guys. The producer is Shaun Himmerick, who was the producer for Shaolin Monks, and Shaun and I every once in a while will go back to check the game out in L.A. and give our comments, feedback and whatnot. We have a really good relationship with them, in terms of they understand what Mortal Kombat is.
GI: How much input have you had on it?
Boon: Quite a bit. We toyed with what is an appropriate number of motions that we want to ask the player to do to perform a special move. Obviously, we’re not going to ask the player to draw the alphabet and then you throw Scorpion’s spear, because it’s way too long of a sequence. So, we realized that simple two-directional motions–away-towards, up-down or a modified circular motion for the guys who do backflips and stuff—those were the things that felt the best, and that was really our criteria; what felt good when you do the move and you see the character do it, how long it takes before you do the move before you see the action. That was the criterion. Anything that felt like, “OK, draw the letter Z and then the guy does a different motion,” we just eliminated that. It was based on what felt right.
GI: We’ve obviously seen the video and watched how everything works–
Boon: The dork video (laughs)
GI: How intuitive is it? We’ve seen a lot of games that have come through since the Wii’s launch that, on paper, sound like they would work really well, but in actual reality don’t work very well. Has it been challenging?
Boon: We started following some of those games, thinking, “OK, everyone’s doing it this way, so that should be the way to do it,” but we realized that the complex motions were just too much to ask of a player in the heat of a battle, you know all those crazy things. So, what we found, was that the simpler we got with the motions, the more intuitive it felt and the more people said, “OK, now I get it.” We used to have it so you’d hold the trigger button and you had to let go at the same time that you’d do it, and once you tell somebody that, they’d do it and they wouldn’t let go. Then you’d say, “You have to let go now,” and they wouldn’t do it or they’d let go too early. We decided to remove all of those requirements and let simple motions be the main thing that’s required of the player. That was a challenge, just narrowing it down, trying the complex stuff and saying, “Why doesn’t this feel good?” And then saying there are real simple motions and that is what’s working. That was the big challenge. It wasn’t a technical challenge, it was more of a gameplay/feel challenge.
GI: Why isn’t it playable here?
Boon: The main reason is that for the really good players, right now you can fire off Scorpion’s spear and you can do his hellfire. And there’s this little window of when you want to combine the moves together, pop a guy up in the air and then do his backflip kick before he lands on the ground. That’s stuff we’re in the process of tightening right now–because we definitely don’t want to have anybody play it, let alone release the game before all that stuff is tightened up–and that’s our main focus right now. The stuff works, but it’s not as tight as we really want it to be.
GI: Are all the modes that are in the versions that are already out going to be included in the Wii version?
Boon: Yeah, we have all of the Konquest mode and all of the Motor Kombat and the Kreate a Fighter–all that stuff is contained in the game. We added the endurance mode and we added the Chameleon character from way back in the N64 days because everybody bitched and moaned about it. (laughs)We had the advantage of releasing the first game, seeing what people wanted more of and adding that into the game.
GI: Are you supporting online at all?
Boon: I wish. Right now, there’s not an infrastructure that’s set up for us to go online with the lobbies and all that. I’m hoping future Wii games will have that stuff set up and we’ll be ready to do that.
GI: Now that the Wii’s out, you were such a fan of it before, talking about Mortal Kombat–even though you didn’t say that–what’s your experience with it been like? What are some of the games that you’ve been playing on it?
Boon: It’s really weird. You know, Nintendo’s presentation for it saying, “It’s Wii, it’s more people, more people are seeing it,” at first, I wondered if that was more of an ad campaign than was their intention, but that remote does do that. The fact that anybody can wave something up and down and left and right, and not everybody can do a circular fireball motion with the A button makes it more accessible to people. That’s what we realized, and that’s what happened with Armageddon on the Wii. People have come up to me and said, “I’ve never been able to do that circular motion, but now I can throw Sub-Zero’s fireball. I’ve never been able to do that away-towards stuff, but now I can throw Scorpion’s spear.” That has been the very pleasant discovery that we found doing this game.
GI: What about WiiConnect24? Are there any plans for downloadable content or other things that you’re thinking about?
Boon: Maybe for future next-gen stuff. I think downloadable content and episodic stuff is inevitable. I’d like to think—I wouldn’t promise—but I’d like to think that our next-generation Mortal Kombat game will have characters you can download, backgrounds you can download–and we’re designing our games to have that kind of content in packets that could be added to the existing game.
GI: Let’s talk about next-gen. You talked a little bit about the arcade concept that you’ve been mulling around in your head. Is that something that you guys are fleshing out?
Boon: Yeah. I always thought that the standard lobby approach of hooking people up online seemed kind of obvious to do. I’d love to incorporate that into gameplay. We have some really crazy ideas that are really kind of extreme, and I’d be hesitant to mention them because people would assume that they’re in the next game. But we’re definitely looking into different interfaces to the player for a lobby. For a way to get players hooked up and playing online, an ongoing thing like a ranking system or whatnot. I’ve always wanted to have sort of a virtual arcade. It’s weird, because I can picture it in my head and I can see walking through the arcade and putting your quarter up, but I wonder how many people have experienced that part. It’s been so long—the early ‘90s—before some people were born, and they say, “What the hell is an arcade?” We’re trying a bunch of stuff right now.
GI: How far into development is it?
Boon: The main thing we’re doing right now is the core technology. We’re using the Unreal 3 engine, and we’re getting our base, “How do display a character, normal-mapping, bump-mapping, shadows” all the things that are expected of the game. I have a bunch of ideas on paper in terms of things that I’d like to theoretically try, but it’s not like it’s in a playable state yet.
GI: I think last E3 I asked you if we’d see the game for the first time at the next E3. Now that E3’s been pushed back to July, do you think it’s still a possibility?
Boon: Which game?
GI: The next-gen MK.
Boon: No. You know, we’re doing something with the next game that’s unbelievably unexpected, and there’s going to be an announcement. I totally was told, “You cannot talk about this thing.” I think it’s going to be rolled out.
GI: Fishing. Mortal Kombat Fishing.
Boon: I wish I could—I can tell you after we’re done with this interview and you shut off the recorder. (laughs)
GI: How has the experience been with the next-gen, and what are some of the nuances that you’re finding with the Xbox 360 and PS3?
Boon: Our goal, graphically, with this game is to be as gritty and—I don’t like to use the word “dirty,” because I don’t want to imply not-cool graphics—but a very dark, serious Mortal Kombat. Not vibrant, saturated colors, but more of a really down and dirty Mortal Kombat game. To me, when I saw Gears of War, I was like, “Holy shit! That’s the look that we’ve been talking about.” Visually, that’s what we want to do. Gameplay-wise, I kind of attribute it to what we did with Deadly Alliance, where everything is thrown out. We’re not going to have three fighting styles, we’re not going to have the same punches and kicks and the same kind of control scheme. Everything is getting trashed. We’re reinventing everything from the ground up. We really think that’s needed—you know, we’re on Mortal Kombat 8, in a sense—to kind of wipe the slate clean every once in a while, and I kind of feel that now is the time. Our visual presentation and our game presentation and our thing that you’ll hear about very soon are all going to be new to this game. It’s going to be nothing like you’ve ever seen before.
GI: What’s it like to flush it all and start over?
Boon: It’s really scary. There’s some stuff that I thought really worked well in the previous three games, but I really feel that we can’t do any more of it. We can’t do the new fighting-style stuff. We need to do something different. A lot of people say, “How do they keep selling well?” And we really believe that’s one of the reasons. We’re not afraid to say, “That’s working, but it’s time to do something new because it’s been five years.”
GI: Hypothetical time-frame for release. Are we talking ’08?
Boon: Yeah. I would guess—and I wouldn’t promise—it would be around the fall, Novemberish time of 2008.
GI: Across all three platforms?
Boon: We’re talking about that.
GI: What are you playing now, for fun?
Boon: I’m playing the hell out of Guitar Hero 2. I love that game. Gears of War is awesome. I haven’t had time to finish it, though. And I’m ashamed to say I’m trying to finish God of War 1 before God of War 2 comes out. (laughs) I haven’t had time to finish it. Those are the three things I’m into right now.
==========
The Mortal Kombat master takes back what he said to us about not developing Mortal Kombat for Wii, and explains how the game works with Nintendo's system. Plus get some interesting new information about the next-gen all new Mortal Kombat game and when we'll most likely be playing it.
Game Informer: In our last interview, we talked quite a bit about the Wii and the fact that Mortal Kombat wouldn’t work on the Wii. Surprisingly, that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore…(laughs)
Ed Boon: I think my theory is that my initial impression was that it was going to be a challenge. You know, I mentioned 15 years of associating special moves and fatalities with away-towards-A, away-towards-Y, away-towards-B, high block, low block–you know, all that stuff. And then you suddenly give a guy–the analogy I’d always say was, “Use a steering wheel to do a fighting game.” You know, can you do it? I think my initial reaction was, wow, that’s going to be really tough. And there were challenges, but, once we got a correlation between motions, the big thing we discovered was that you go up-down with the Wii remote and your guy drops into the ground to teleport while you’re doing that downward motion. That really feels good. As you’re going down, your guy’s going down. If you go away and then towards, Scorpion throws his spear in the direction that you swing your Wii remote. Once we got that connection, we realized, “OK, this is the way to go,” and the other stuff just kind of fell into place. So yeah, I never said that. (laughs)
GI: Good answer. (laughs) Is this your team that’s working on it?
Boon: Our team’s main focus right now is the next-gen game that we’re doing. The game is being developed in California–a company called JGI–they’re a really great group of guys. The producer is Shaun Himmerick, who was the producer for Shaolin Monks, and Shaun and I every once in a while will go back to check the game out in L.A. and give our comments, feedback and whatnot. We have a really good relationship with them, in terms of they understand what Mortal Kombat is.
GI: How much input have you had on it?
Boon: Quite a bit. We toyed with what is an appropriate number of motions that we want to ask the player to do to perform a special move. Obviously, we’re not going to ask the player to draw the alphabet and then you throw Scorpion’s spear, because it’s way too long of a sequence. So, we realized that simple two-directional motions–away-towards, up-down or a modified circular motion for the guys who do backflips and stuff—those were the things that felt the best, and that was really our criteria; what felt good when you do the move and you see the character do it, how long it takes before you do the move before you see the action. That was the criterion. Anything that felt like, “OK, draw the letter Z and then the guy does a different motion,” we just eliminated that. It was based on what felt right.
GI: We’ve obviously seen the video and watched how everything works–
Boon: The dork video (laughs)
GI: How intuitive is it? We’ve seen a lot of games that have come through since the Wii’s launch that, on paper, sound like they would work really well, but in actual reality don’t work very well. Has it been challenging?
Boon: We started following some of those games, thinking, “OK, everyone’s doing it this way, so that should be the way to do it,” but we realized that the complex motions were just too much to ask of a player in the heat of a battle, you know all those crazy things. So, what we found, was that the simpler we got with the motions, the more intuitive it felt and the more people said, “OK, now I get it.” We used to have it so you’d hold the trigger button and you had to let go at the same time that you’d do it, and once you tell somebody that, they’d do it and they wouldn’t let go. Then you’d say, “You have to let go now,” and they wouldn’t do it or they’d let go too early. We decided to remove all of those requirements and let simple motions be the main thing that’s required of the player. That was a challenge, just narrowing it down, trying the complex stuff and saying, “Why doesn’t this feel good?” And then saying there are real simple motions and that is what’s working. That was the big challenge. It wasn’t a technical challenge, it was more of a gameplay/feel challenge.
GI: Why isn’t it playable here?
Boon: The main reason is that for the really good players, right now you can fire off Scorpion’s spear and you can do his hellfire. And there’s this little window of when you want to combine the moves together, pop a guy up in the air and then do his backflip kick before he lands on the ground. That’s stuff we’re in the process of tightening right now–because we definitely don’t want to have anybody play it, let alone release the game before all that stuff is tightened up–and that’s our main focus right now. The stuff works, but it’s not as tight as we really want it to be.
GI: Are all the modes that are in the versions that are already out going to be included in the Wii version?
Boon: Yeah, we have all of the Konquest mode and all of the Motor Kombat and the Kreate a Fighter–all that stuff is contained in the game. We added the endurance mode and we added the Chameleon character from way back in the N64 days because everybody bitched and moaned about it. (laughs)We had the advantage of releasing the first game, seeing what people wanted more of and adding that into the game.
GI: Are you supporting online at all?
Boon: I wish. Right now, there’s not an infrastructure that’s set up for us to go online with the lobbies and all that. I’m hoping future Wii games will have that stuff set up and we’ll be ready to do that.
GI: Now that the Wii’s out, you were such a fan of it before, talking about Mortal Kombat–even though you didn’t say that–what’s your experience with it been like? What are some of the games that you’ve been playing on it?
Boon: It’s really weird. You know, Nintendo’s presentation for it saying, “It’s Wii, it’s more people, more people are seeing it,” at first, I wondered if that was more of an ad campaign than was their intention, but that remote does do that. The fact that anybody can wave something up and down and left and right, and not everybody can do a circular fireball motion with the A button makes it more accessible to people. That’s what we realized, and that’s what happened with Armageddon on the Wii. People have come up to me and said, “I’ve never been able to do that circular motion, but now I can throw Sub-Zero’s fireball. I’ve never been able to do that away-towards stuff, but now I can throw Scorpion’s spear.” That has been the very pleasant discovery that we found doing this game.
GI: What about WiiConnect24? Are there any plans for downloadable content or other things that you’re thinking about?
Boon: Maybe for future next-gen stuff. I think downloadable content and episodic stuff is inevitable. I’d like to think—I wouldn’t promise—but I’d like to think that our next-generation Mortal Kombat game will have characters you can download, backgrounds you can download–and we’re designing our games to have that kind of content in packets that could be added to the existing game.
GI: Let’s talk about next-gen. You talked a little bit about the arcade concept that you’ve been mulling around in your head. Is that something that you guys are fleshing out?
Boon: Yeah. I always thought that the standard lobby approach of hooking people up online seemed kind of obvious to do. I’d love to incorporate that into gameplay. We have some really crazy ideas that are really kind of extreme, and I’d be hesitant to mention them because people would assume that they’re in the next game. But we’re definitely looking into different interfaces to the player for a lobby. For a way to get players hooked up and playing online, an ongoing thing like a ranking system or whatnot. I’ve always wanted to have sort of a virtual arcade. It’s weird, because I can picture it in my head and I can see walking through the arcade and putting your quarter up, but I wonder how many people have experienced that part. It’s been so long—the early ‘90s—before some people were born, and they say, “What the hell is an arcade?” We’re trying a bunch of stuff right now.
GI: How far into development is it?
Boon: The main thing we’re doing right now is the core technology. We’re using the Unreal 3 engine, and we’re getting our base, “How do display a character, normal-mapping, bump-mapping, shadows” all the things that are expected of the game. I have a bunch of ideas on paper in terms of things that I’d like to theoretically try, but it’s not like it’s in a playable state yet.
GI: I think last E3 I asked you if we’d see the game for the first time at the next E3. Now that E3’s been pushed back to July, do you think it’s still a possibility?
Boon: Which game?
GI: The next-gen MK.
Boon: No. You know, we’re doing something with the next game that’s unbelievably unexpected, and there’s going to be an announcement. I totally was told, “You cannot talk about this thing.” I think it’s going to be rolled out.
GI: Fishing. Mortal Kombat Fishing.
Boon: I wish I could—I can tell you after we’re done with this interview and you shut off the recorder. (laughs)
GI: How has the experience been with the next-gen, and what are some of the nuances that you’re finding with the Xbox 360 and PS3?
Boon: Our goal, graphically, with this game is to be as gritty and—I don’t like to use the word “dirty,” because I don’t want to imply not-cool graphics—but a very dark, serious Mortal Kombat. Not vibrant, saturated colors, but more of a really down and dirty Mortal Kombat game. To me, when I saw Gears of War, I was like, “Holy shit! That’s the look that we’ve been talking about.” Visually, that’s what we want to do. Gameplay-wise, I kind of attribute it to what we did with Deadly Alliance, where everything is thrown out. We’re not going to have three fighting styles, we’re not going to have the same punches and kicks and the same kind of control scheme. Everything is getting trashed. We’re reinventing everything from the ground up. We really think that’s needed—you know, we’re on Mortal Kombat 8, in a sense—to kind of wipe the slate clean every once in a while, and I kind of feel that now is the time. Our visual presentation and our game presentation and our thing that you’ll hear about very soon are all going to be new to this game. It’s going to be nothing like you’ve ever seen before.
GI: What’s it like to flush it all and start over?
Boon: It’s really scary. There’s some stuff that I thought really worked well in the previous three games, but I really feel that we can’t do any more of it. We can’t do the new fighting-style stuff. We need to do something different. A lot of people say, “How do they keep selling well?” And we really believe that’s one of the reasons. We’re not afraid to say, “That’s working, but it’s time to do something new because it’s been five years.”
GI: Hypothetical time-frame for release. Are we talking ’08?
Boon: Yeah. I would guess—and I wouldn’t promise—it would be around the fall, Novemberish time of 2008.
GI: Across all three platforms?
Boon: We’re talking about that.
GI: What are you playing now, for fun?
Boon: I’m playing the hell out of Guitar Hero 2. I love that game. Gears of War is awesome. I haven’t had time to finish it, though. And I’m ashamed to say I’m trying to finish God of War 1 before God of War 2 comes out. (laughs) I haven’t had time to finish it. Those are the three things I’m into right now.
