E3 2008 | Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe

Midway’s Hector Sanchez Talks Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe

July 22, 2008

Associate producer Hector Sanchez fanned on his first shot at pulling off a Fatality with Scorpion during the demo for Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe. At least he didn’t have to face the abuse from the rest of the team back at Midway Chicago. “John Edwards, one of the game developers, failed to get a Fatality during a spot for X-play. The entire team saw it live streaming and called him up afterwards. Everyone was like, ‘What the hell man!’ Total failure.”

Unlike the aborted Fatalities, the latest MK in the franchise looks like a success in a lot of different areas. For one thing, Midway has taken it back to the game’s old-school 2-D roots. “Ed Boon (the co-creator of the Mortal Kombat franchise) really listens to the fan base. He just wanted to do it. When we announced the next MK game he said it’s back to basics, we’re going to get gritty, back to what made Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat.”

That means a cast of characters dominated so far by members of the original arcade roster, an emphasis of right to left combat (though gamers can perform sidestep moves) and ditching features like weapons and multiple fighting systems. “We’ve kind of rebooted the franchise and taken out the fluff. We took out Conquest Mode, we don’t have Baraka on a go-kart anymore.”

New tweaks include a Klose Kombat system that initiates brief moments of punch/counterpunch attacks keyed off of timed button hits and two new transition battles. If you throw your opponent off a cliff you can continue to pound them into hamburger on the way down. A horizontal transition revives the Test Your Might feature and lets you drive your foe through several walls of a building keyed off of straight up button mashing. Then there is, of course, the addition of the DC Comics cast of characters.

Midway has released the cast of characters piecemeal over the past few weeks with Captain Marvel and Liu Kang as the next confirmed characters yet to be revealed. That leaves roughly twelve spots still open, as well as the possibility of an Aquaman blue whale turd Brutality. Sanchez would not confirm or deny any members of the cast but he did say that things got dicey at Midway when they selected the cast. “Basically we had a character meeting a couple years ago when everyone went in with a list of who they wanted. The team had real creative input as to which characters would make the most sense in this next iteration. Quite a few fights broke out. It was almost like a court case. You had to show evidence to prove why a character deserved to be in the game or should get left out.”

With only 20 to 22 spots on the roster and half of them going to DC characters, there will be more than a few MK legends on the sidelines and a lot of pissed off fans. But, according to Sanchez, “That’s MK all the way. We’re going from pissing off soccer moms to pissing off fanboys, it’s a nice transition for us.”

The developers didn’t want to present the game as a simple versus set up. “The story mode, to me, is really important because I don’t want to put characters on the screen without a reason for them to be there. If you go by the comic book canon, Superman should win every fight so we had to do something to make it make sense,” said Sanchez. DC comics writers Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti both contributed to penning the storyline.

“There’s going to be a reason why these two teams are fighting. It’s not going to be like Capcom versus Marvel where it’s just a bunch of characters on the screen,” said Sanchez. The game will progress from both the standpoint of the DC and the MK perspectives and gradually come together. “There’s a reason why Scorpion and Batman are fighting each other, there’s a reason why Superman’s powers are weakened. There’s a story that will bring the two universes together.”

If that’s not your cup of tea you can content yourself with simply beating the shit out of comic book characters. Just don’t expect Kano’s homegrown brand of caridology. Midway had to throttle back the gore to a Teen rating due to the license with DC. According to Sanchez, that wasn’t a problem for the team, “I love a challenge. And the Teen rating kept us from defaulting to the blood and gore and violence to making the Fatalities more bizarre and disturbing and more artistic as opposed to saying, ‘Oh fuck it, just rip his heart out or break his spine or something.’ MK over the years was just kind of ‘throw blood on it.’ Now we have to take this T-rating and make the best MK game possible.”

With the words “Finish Him” scrolling across the screen Sanchez maneuvered Scorpion into position and summed up the game, “I think we’ve made the best MK we’ve put out…man, isn’t really weird seeing Batman on fire like that?”

Das Gamer will keep you posted with more MK news as it develops.

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