Mortal Kombat (video Game) - Development and Promotion

Development and Promotion

Originally, creators Ed Boon and John Tobias wanted to create an action game featuring a digitized version of martial arts film star Jean-Claude Van Damme. However, Van Damme was already in negotiations with another company for a video game that ultimately was never released. Van Damme's likeness remained in the form of playable character Johnny Cage (with whom he shares his name's initials, JC), a Hollywood martial arts movie star who performs a split punch to the groin (performed by Van Damme in a scene from Bloodsport). Ed Boon and John Tobias have stated that Midway tasked them with the project of creating a "combat game for release within a year", which the two believed was intended to compete with the popular Street Fighter II. Mortal Kombat was reportedly developed in 10 months from 1991 to 1992, with a test version seeing limited release halfway through the development cycle. In an interview with the Official Nintendo Magazine, Boon stated that the development team initially consisted of four people - himself as programmer, artists John Tobias and John Vogel, and Dan Forden as sound designer.

The final arcade game used eight megabytes of graphics data, with each character having 64 colours and around 300 frames of animation.

The team had difficulty settling on a name for the game. Boon has stated that for six months during development "...nobody could come up with a name nobody didn't hate." Some of the names suggested were Kumite, Dragon Attack, Death Blow and Fatality. Someone had written down "combat" on the drawing board for the names in Boon's office and someone wrote a K over the C, according to Boon, "...just to be kind of weird..." Pinball designer Steve Ritchie was sitting in Boon's office, saw the word "Kombat" and said to him, "Why don't you name it Mortal Kombat?", a name that Boon stated "just stuck." The series itself commonly uses the letter "K" in place of "C" for words containing the hard C sound.

The launch of Mortal Kombat for home consoles by Acclaim Entertainment was one of the largest video game launches of the time. A flood of TV commercials heralded the simultaneous release of all four home versions of the game on September 13, 1993, a date dubbed "Mortal Monday. " In the same year, an official Mortal Kombat Collector's Edition, written and illustrated by the game's designer artist John Tobias, was available through mail order, describing the backstory of the game in a greater detail. The mail order deal was displayed during the attract mode of the game. The comic book would later be sold normally around the country, although it was close to impossible to get a copy outside of the United States. The entire comic book was later included as an unlockable bonus in "The Krypt" mode of Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance.

Mortal Kombat: The Album, an album by The Immortals featuring techno songs, was released in May 1994. It features two themes for the game, "Techno Syndrome" and "Hypnotic House". "Techno Syndrome" was adapted for the 1995 movie soundtrack and incorporated the familiar "Mortal Kombat!" yell from the Mortal Monday commercials. Jeff Rovin also penned a novelization of the first Mortal Kombat game, which was published in June 1995 in order to coincide with the release of the first movie. There were also lines of action figures based on the original characters.