The Mortal Kombat franchise is better known for its copious carnage than its riveting narratives, but Chicago-based NetherRealm Studios put story in the spotlight for its upcoming Mortal Kombat reboot.
"With the reboot of the franchise, we’re actually able to expand upon the stories where we weren’t able to before," said Hector Sanchez, NetherRealm producer, during a recent conference call with PlayStation Universe. "We have a lot of members on the team that have been around [since the early days], and know the lore of the characters, so they were able to develop and flesh out their characters a lot more know than they’ve ever been able to before."
Though the characters of Mortal Kombat I, II, and III were iconic, their backstories were limited to about a paragraph of text each. Now, this new Mortal Kombat features over two hours of cinematic content — and that doesn’t even include the real-time scenes.
"We wanted to show a bit more of who [the characters] are beyond [their fighting style]," added MK Lead Graphics Engineer John Greenberg. "Obviously that’s a bit hard to do with more than 20 characters that you have to show and interact with, but that was a big goal: to give you a sense of who these people are that you’re playing with, not just a bunch of people beating each other up."
Mortal Kombat is set to launch on Tuesday, April 19 in North America and Thursday, April 21 in Europe.