14 DAY TRIAL // In a recent interview, Ed Boon, the executive producer of the Mortal Kombat series, declared that the upcoming new installment will take the franchise back to its Mature-rated roots. The last title that was produced by his team was the Teen-rated Mortal Kombat versus DC Universe, quite big departure of from the established Mortal Kombat vibe.
“So from that standpoint, we just heard a lot of feedback asking, ‘Is the next game going to be back to an M-rated presentation,’ and, you know, ‘traditional’ MK? So we really felt that now is just a really great time to explore a reboot of sorts,” he told Gamasutra. Boon continued to comment that the presentation of the Mortal Kombat games had already been rebooted a number of times, but this had not happened in a while and that, yes, it was the right moment to rethink how a Mortal Kombat game looked and played out.
He explained that there was a feeling that those planets were aligned with the return of many games to the core elements that made them great. He gave examples of Street Fighter, Sonic the Hedgehog and Twisted Metal as other titles heading in the same direction, from a design viewpoint, as the upcoming Mortal Kombat.
M-rated means that spectacular fatalities of the past are coming back, alongside the levels of violence from the first few titles in the series. “Our goal with our violence and all that stuff is way more to just surprise, maybe entertain, just from the outrageousness of it all,” Boon said. “You know, the fatalities are just so crazy over-the-top that they’re more inventive than inherently violent. I mean, they’re violent — don’t get me wrong — but it’s just funny, just such over the top ways of killing people, that you just can’t take it seriously.” This Mortal Kombat reboot is set to be released in 2011 for the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360.