Mortal Kombat's Mature Rating Allows Gruesome Fatalities

Mortal Kombat, the upcoming reboot of the popular fighting game series, benefits largely from its M-rated nature, which allowed the develops to really take the Fatality moves to new and gruesome heights.

The upcoming Mortal Kombat title aims at making amends with fans for the last few releases, and will once more have a mature rating that will enable the team to add a lot of violent moves and fatalities.

"Ed Boon and the rest of the MK team knew that returning to a Mature game rating - plus the tremendous graphic improvement and new technologies we now have access to - would let us take fatalities to an unsurpassed level of unimaginable brutality," said the game's Art Director Steve Beran on the PlayStation Blog.

The developer explained the new design philosophy, saying that in the past, the game was built and then fatalities were added.

Now though, the fatalities were conceived in the early stages of development, allowing them to be better incorporated into the fighting mechanics.

Each character will have at least two fatalities, and in some particular environments, more will be available.

"Additionally, we wanted to make sure there were a ton of fatalities for all of the iconic warriors in the game (with two fatalities, minimum, for every character) as well as fatalities for some of the dynamic environments. There is a looot of content for players to uncover – and we finally had plenty of time to build it all," Beran added.
 
In case you're wondering just where the NetherRealm developers draw inspiration from for these moves, Beran explained that the fatalities were conceived from a variety of sources, ranging from gruesome murder news stores to old horror movies or even some of the nightmares experienced by the actual developers.

The new Mortal Kombat title will be out on April 18, in Europe, and April 19, in North America, for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.