The fighting game has returned in a big way. With the release of Capcom’s Street Fighter IV, the fighting game seems to have captured a certain zeitgeist. While Capcom is now on hand with the recently released Super Street Fighter IV, the upcoming Marvel vs. Capcom 3, and the crossover title Street Fighter X Tekken, and Namco is planning Tekken x Street Fighter and the just announced Tekken Tag Tournament 2, it’s time for the classic Street Fighter arcade rival, Mortal Kombat, to return.
With new technology, like the X-ray moves that show your opponents' insides folding beneath your vicious blows, MK is poised to take back its spot on the roster. IndustryGamers got a chance to speak with NetherRealm’s Shaun Himmerick, the Executive Producer for Mortal Kombat, about the new title and its future.
IndustryGamers: Fighting games have experienced a renaissance, thanks to your former rivals at Capcom. Do you feel that played a part in giving you forward momentum with the Mortal Kombat reboot?
Himmerick: I suppose a little bit. I think the biggest thing that’s helped all fighting games has been the prevalence of online. We have a lot of online features specifically targeting the old school arcade feel. Fighting games were huge when arcades were big, because you could fight that person right there next to you. And then when the home market became more popular, fighting games waned a little bit, but now that online is so common and popular, I think that’s brought all fighting games back, cause it is just that easy to get online and play people in that kind of fashion.
IG: A lot of social features are making their way into titles. Are you planning anything to make the Mortal Kombat community bigger?
Himmerick: Yeah, we’re doing two big things. We’re doing tournaments, but we don’t consider that a big part of our thing. We’re doing all the standard features like that: online fights and tournaments. We’re also doing a thing we call King of the Hill. Which literally is trying to recreate the arcade feel, so you’ll get in and on the Xbox have your avatar and on the PS3 we’ll create some. Then your guys will sit there and watch the two guys fighting. So you can see the guys fighting, “Oh, he’s using that character!” [And then you can ] kind of plan, “Oh, I’m going to use this character against that. He keeps using that move over and over, I know how to battle that.” And you can watch your guy getting closer to the front of the line. It’s kind of like the quarter thing. So you can watch that and battle guys, stay in the line, and go, “Aww, man he’s done ten in a row!” And a lot of our menus you’ll see things like on King of the Hill, that guy’s won ten in a row, so people are trying to get in the room.
But also we’re doing a lot of this stuff where you’ll be able hit the Twitter update or a Facebook update. “Hey I just beat this, I defeated the game, I did this challenge.” A lot of those kinds of features so you can kind of brag to your friends about those things, and it links back to our chat boards as well.
IG: How long have you been working on the title? Were you working on it during the shift from Midway to WB Games?
Himmerick: Basically, right at the end of [Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe] we started this game. So, for the most part, I’d say for 95 percent of the team, the change from Midway to Warner - one paycheck was Midway, the next was WB, but otherwise they didn’t notice the difference. The studio leadership, the guys who have to deal with the business side of it, we noticed a bit more of it, but for the most part the team just worked straight after MKDC onto this. Obviously, a lot of distractions…
IG: Do you feel that Warner Bros gives you a great deal of leeway? You didn’t have your own, specific studio name at Midway and now you’re NetherRealm Studios.
Himmerick: We’ve been really happy with how Warner Bros has set us up and treated us since the acquisition. Giving us our own name - they encouraged us to have our own studio name, our own identity. We didn’t even think of it. They were like “You guys need a studio name.” [We thought] “That’s a neat idea, we should do that!” And they’ve given us a lot of support.
If you look through the history of Mortal Kombat, it’s been every two years like clockwork on Christmas. We asked if we could have some more time to polish the game a bit more. We could’ve made this Christmas, but we’d like to polish it, get it more tuned and balanced, and really come out with a competition quality game. Warner said “Yeah, great! Take the time you need, we want the best game possible, so take that extra time.” So that’s something that under Midway we just couldn’t financially have done probably, but with Warner it’s not like we’re going to keep Warner alive. So that’s a nice, extra bonus we get; we’re not coming out until March of next year.
IG: Another big push in the industry is stereoscopic 3D gaming. Crytek has already said its next Crysis game will run on both systems in full 3D. You’re doing it for the PlayStation 3 version, but is it in the works for the Xbox 360 version?
Himmerick: Do you know if Crysis 2 is doing stereoscopic on the Xbox 360?
IG: They’ve said all three versions will be in full stereoscopic 3D.
Himmerick: We have the tech to do it. Up until very recently, Microsoft didn’t support it on their platform yet. They were talking about doing it and we could do it if they do an SDK upgrade that has it built into the machine like Sony does. All of our tech is in place to be able to do it.
Our deal with Sony might require us to be exclusive with 3D. We’re doing a deal - the deal might not even be done. There’s also things like Batman: Arkham Asylum which did the packed-in glasses, because I’m not sure how many people are going to have stereoscopic 3DTVs within the next year. Maybe 5 percent, 10 percent if Sony and those guys are really lucky. So we’re looking at some of the ones like the Batman: Arkham Asylum: Game of The Year Edition that came with the glasses. So we’re looking at those as well, we’ve got all that integrated. It’s a matter of what marketing wants to package for Collector’s Editions or what exclusives we want to do. But we have all that working.
IG: Do you feel that 3D is a trend that will become more mainstream from a player perspective?
Himmerick: I don’t know. It’s going to be really interesting. I think it’s going to take off very big because it’s the new thing. Bloom was huge at one point. I think it’s going to be – in a year, you’re probably not going to be seeing a lot of games that don’t support it in some way. I’ve seen a lot of game demos now in 3D and some games really benefit from it. For some games it’s like, “Why is this in 3D?”
[Mortal Kombat] is pretty neat because it’s on a 2D fighting plane. It’s got a natural, nice pop to the 3D. The characters, the UI, the depth of the game. Our game sets itself up really well for it, but a driving game also sets itself up for it. But some adventure games where you control the camera, I can see that making people dizzy. It’s going to be a little odd. So, I think everyone’s going to have it for a while and then it will boil down to the games that really need it or can benefit from it.
IG: You seem to have a really robust engine here. Are you planning PSP or even 3DS versions of Mortal Kombat?
Himmerick: We’re not launching day one on all consoles like that. We are looking at them, we have a PSP2 in the house, and we’re looking at the engine, like what can it support. Always a big thing for us is the performance. We’re running at 60 fps, what can we do and do we have to build all the art assets over. We’re definitely looking at them. PSP2 looks like it’s a pretty powerful machine. We don’t have a 3DS system in house yet, but we’re looking to get one, and we’ll certainly look at what its power is.
IG: Are you looking at any transmedia for Mortal Kombat? THQ is planning more of it with expansion of their IP into movies, comics, and television shows.
Himmerick: Obviously Warner Bros already does a lot of that. So we’re having meetings. Which ones do we want to do, how do we organize it? Under Midway we had to do it all ourselves, but Warner already has a lot of those things. Just a little while ago, I had a meeting with the movie guys about what things we can do for the movie or episodic stuff online. Obviously we’re tied into DC, so when you’re talking about comic book stuff…
With us, we could do everything, but it’s a matter of Ed [Boon] and the team picking what fits best with the IP and not just doing everything because we can. What fits well for us and what is a good fit for each game and is a quality product? “Okay, great! We have Mortal Kombat lunchboxes!” I know they exist and they’re cool, but is that really something that we want to go after and do?
IG: How difficult was the full X-ray battle damage effect in the game? You’re modeling the characters from the inside out. Was that something you started with in the beginning?
Himmerick: We did two things. Right off the bat, Ed said the features that he wanted to do: the X-ray, the backgrounds the way he wanted. If you notice the desert, we have sand tech; the sand changes as you slide your feet through it. All the blood is actually blood physics. When blood flies off people, it’ll actually land on people just like blood physically would. So you see the damage, all the blood that’s on them and on the ground is actually physically flying and landing. So here’s all the things we wanted to do, and the programmers go, “Oh my God. Okay, here’s what we can do.” We worked out budgets pretty early on, and we prototype it, “here’s how much for this, here’s how much for that.”
Building the characters takes a lot longer. When the X-ray is done on Mileena – she’s a woman – she has a different face and her teeth are different. Reptile’s got a reptilian inside, so he has a different skull. Everyone’s a different thing. The robots have cables instead of tendons. So if you do an X-ray on Sektor he doesn’t have tendons, he has cables running through him. So to design a character went from taking about six weeks to make, to about two months or ten weeks.
IG: Will you be doing new characters for this one, or is this more of a ‘greatest hits’-style game?
Himmerick: We’re definitely starting with that. The ten playable here, with Shao Kahn and Raiden being the other two we’ve already announced, so those are all coming back. We’re not announcing any other characters, but with those twelve you can kind of see the direction we’re going with all the characters.
IG: Thanks Shaun. Best of luck to you and the entire team at NetherRealm Studios with the new Mortal Kombat.
