How Ed Boon revolutionized the fighting genre with Mortal Kombat and brought the debate on violence in video games to the table.
After many weeks of waiting, we already have Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate here, which fulfills many wishes of the fans of the saga: The acclaimed return of Mileena and Rain, the meeting of guest stars from eighties action cinema such as Terminator or Robocop, and the compilation of all the extra content of the last installment of this title. And of course, the hallmark of this legendary title is not lacking: exquisite gore intertwined with a cheeky sense of humor. After his signing, we find Ed Boon who, along with John Tobias, has brought us one of the longest-running and most irreverent sagas. Today at FreeGameTips we tell you the story of this developer and voice actor.
Pinball as a professional debut
The history of video games has been marked by the debate on violence in video games. In an environment where many of the works require killing to advance, the discussion about how to portray death is natural. And yet there is something liberating about the virtual acts of anger we commit. If we think about references, Mortal Kombat is a saga that not only managed to create an age classification in video games, but also made us appreciate titles with daring content and away from children. Its creator Ed Boon has been at the helm for 28 years to bring us a feast of blood and guts that we never tire of.
Ed Boon (Chicago, 1964) was clear from his adolescence that the development of video games was his vocation, as he recounts in Game Informer. His first games were to the pinball machines of the high school bowling alley, and during this stage he began to become fond of programming: “I had an Atari 800 and I used to program in Basic, and then I learned assembly language, and I got into that world . It was my hobby to figure out how graphics worked and where to write in memory so that a pixel would appear on the screen. That was the thing about the player-projectile graphics. So when I went to school I would think, ‘Well, I like to do this in my spare time, but I will really need a steady job to eat.’ That was my artistic flair. But I got lucky with a job for putting an asterisk on my resume, which gave me a position as a pinball programmer and that led me to video games. ‘Well, I’m going to make video games’ never occurred to me, because then I didn’t even think it could be an option. “
Portrait of Ed Boon
Williams Entertainment was Ed Boon’s debut in the world of programming, where he was working on developing pinball machines. That gave him a lot of background that he later applied to video game design: solving problems of writing software, programming techniques, and implementing ideas. “The challenge was, ‘How do we get this done? How do we make a spear come out of his hand? How do we make this thing burn? “
Ed Boon opened up to new specializations such as video game design itself. According to the creator, then there was not so much differentiation between the developer and designer, so that both professions overlapped in the same. In addition, during the creative process of the games he was able to open up a new branch: dubbing. At the time, the studio had no budget to hire an actor, so they turned to Boon to provide voices for some of the plays. “Can you come here and play a guy who’s getting mugged?” Boon recalls during his interview.
Ed Boon and John Tobias pose with a Mortal Kombat 3 arcade.
The badass version of Street Fighter
In Williams, Ed Boon met John Tobias, with whom he would later create the masterpiece of his career: Mortal Kombat. The duo struck up a great friendship by discovering things they had in common. One of them was Street Fighter II, which dazzled them with stylized graphics that seemed handmade and typical of an anime. “We are going to create the bad version of this game. With blood. We’re going to do the MTV version of Street Fighter, ”Boon plays on Game Informer.
Midway had bought into Williams Entertainment, and it was under their umbrella that the duo of Boon and Tobias made their dream come true. According to an interview for the official Nintendo magazine, the Mortal Kombat creative team consisted of four people: Boon and Tobias themselves along with John Vogel and Dan Forden. Ed Boon also had an ambitious proposal: to have Jean Claude Van Damme as the protagonist of the game and make him one of the biggest claims of the title. The team was determined to get their attention: “We made a demo and sent it to Van Damme. We had put together a tape that was a kind of virtual mockup with what the graphics and the game itself would be like. We called a guy who controls licensing and he said something like this: “I’m sorry, he already has a contract with Sega.” I find it curious because I did not know anything about that game. And I’m still waiting. ”
Character selection screen in Mortal Kombat
But the action movie star continued to inspire Ed Boon and John Tobias’s project. The idea of a hooligan fighting game that combined kung-fu and mysticism. In a way, Van Damme did become one of the initial cast fighters: Johnny Cage, the shameless actor in sunglasses, is the caricatured version of the martial arts artist. The rest of the cast was played by childhood friends of Tobias, who, while lacking the cachet of the Hollywood elite, did engage in groundbreaking play. “We record them in front of a wall and manually erase the edges frame by frame. We did it super fast ”. Other references to Ed Boon’s circles can be found in the game, such as the character of Sonya, named after one of the designer’s sisters. Later, in Mortal Kombat 4, Tanya would be the tribute to her other sister.
Also, Ed Boon voiced Scorpion, the visible face of the series. The origin of his iconic phrase “GET OVER HERE!” It is, at least curious: “In Hight Impact Football there were a lot of players who shouted and at the end said nonsense”. Ed Boon’s recording was used for Scorpion’s attack with his kunai, and it has transcended into video-play culture. This role also earned Ed Boon the Guinness Record for the oldest voice actor in video games.
Scorpion, the visible face of Mortal Kombat.
It is also worth mentioning another curiosity: the birth of the letter K to represent the / k / sound. When Boon’s team was brainstorming a title for the play, names like Kumire, Dragon Attack, Fatality and Death Blow came up. Then someone wrote a K over the C in Combat, which inspired Boon and Tobias to adopt a very distinctive spelling standard that continues to this day both in-game and in promotion.
Extreme violence: controversy and popularity
The first Mortal Kombat was developed in 10 months, with digitized characters that made an impact on the history of fighting games. The realism of the digitized graphics and the extreme violence of their combat took video games to a new level. The “Fatality”, the final creative execution with which to give the bloody finishing touch to a duel, ended up putting on the table a debate on digital entertainment: violence in video games.
Scorpion finishes Kano with a Fatality.
Rob Crossley on the BBC recalls how the launch of Mortal Kombat on Super Nintendo was a break with the family image of the Japanese company: “It was as if Disney broadcast Reservoir Dogs or American Psycho in Sesame Street.” Greg Fischbach, CEO of Acclaim, recalls in this report how Mortal Kombat was the beginning of video games for adults: digital entertainment had focused mainly on the little ones, until the developers contemplated the adult market. However, addressing such an audience would involve playing games that would not be frowned upon by parents.
Senator Joe Lieberman testified before a joint hearing before Congress, which addressed the issue of violence in video games. Wired narrated an episode that catapulted the age classification: “The usual suspects [entre los cuales estaba Mortal Kombat] they were exposed to the jury. A representative of the National Coalition Against Television Violence said that violent video games were training ‘precocious killers’ and a university professor added that Nintendo games were not only violent, but also racist and sexist ”. The result of this pressure led to the creation of the ESRB, the system by which video games are rated by age according to their content.
Kitana’s fatality in Mortal Kombat 11.
On the other hand, the controversy around Mortal Kombat managed to increase the popularity of the game. Retro Gamer ranked it one of the best retro titles, and Forbes considers it one of the kings of arcades. Over the years, we’ve seen new installments of the mystical and bloody tournament. With some deliveries more successful than others, the saga has always known how to adapt to the technological evolution of video games. Ed Boon, who has also participated in projects like Injustice, has claimed to love Mortal Kombat as much as the fans themselves, and lives every creative process as a fan and architect. In Game Informer he tells how neither he himself came to calculate the success of the saga nor its evolution: “Well, there is the school, the institute, the university… I have lived all these stages as a pinball, video game programmer, designer and in all Mortal Kombat games. For the first we were 4 and for the second 5. For the third installment we were already 7 and then 9. And, suddenly, Deadly Alliance had 25 people and I said to myself: ‘what a crazy thing’. To each game, the studio added more people until it had like 180 people and more, along with people in other studios working on the series. It is like a gigantic beast ”.
Regarded by IGN as one of the 100 greatest video game creators, Ed Boon admits to keeping Mortal Kombat 11 alive for as long as possible and as long as fans throw themselves into his battles. With Ultimate as the compilation of a round fighting title, we fondly celebrate a saga that shows that it is possible to enjoy with humor the most extravagant violence of yesterday and forever.
Noob Saibot, whose name is an anagram for Boon and Tobias.
