The first thing you think of when you hear the words "Mortal Kombat" are probably its spine-rippingly gruesome fatalities. Behind the scenes, the fighting game franchise is a lot less brutal — but, somehow, without all the special effects, that just makes it look even more impressive.
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00:00The first thing you think of when you hear the words Mortal Kombat are probably its spine-rippingly
00:06gruesome fatalities.
00:08Behind the scenes, the fighting game franchise is a lot less brutal, but somehow, without
00:13all the special effects, that just makes it look even more impressive.
00:18These days, most people are at least a little bit familiar with motion capture technology.
00:23Body suits covered in dots and wearable face cameras have been used across media industries
00:28to help create the characters in Avatar, The Last of Us, and so much more.
00:33In the early 90s, motion capture was still kind of on the fringes, but certain projects
00:37were beginning to change that.
00:39One of these was Mortal Kombat, which got in on the ground floor of mocap tech.
00:44The first installment of the Mortal Kombat franchise used a kind of motion capture to
00:49bring real-life actors into the game.
00:51If you've ever played the original, you know that all the characters look strikingly real
00:56for a game played on arcade consoles.
00:58The developers at Midway Games took a chance on an emerging technology, hoping that a more
01:03true-to-life look would set their game apart from the handful of other fighting games out
01:07there.
01:08The gamble worked even better than the developers had hoped.
01:11Not only did fans love the look and feel of the game upon release, but the U.S. Congress
01:16took notice of the unique graphic violence in the Mortal Kombat franchise.
01:21Back in the day, this was the height of video game brutality.
01:24You get an opponent, you can rip off his head or something like that.
01:27Sounds like a pretty thrilling game, and this is the kind of violence that critics are pretty
01:31worried about.
01:32After a congressional hearing about the game ignited worries about the government regulating
01:36video games, the Entertainment Software Rating Board, or ESRB, was created to help get ahead
01:42of the issue.
01:45Today we say that the original Mortal Kombat used motion capture to create its characters,
01:50but it didn't work in the way you might think.
01:53Here's some of the original capture footage.
01:56It's easy to see there are some major differences between what the team at Midway did for Mortal
02:01Kombat and how motion capture technology works today.
02:04For one thing, the footage was captured with just a single, stationary camera, and the
02:09actors were all filmed one at a time.
02:12The most obvious difference, though, is that all the actors wore real costumes, not the
02:16dotted bodysuits that you would expect to see today.
02:19Those differences are actually a pretty big deal.
02:23Instead of traditional motion capture, the developers used a new software process that
02:27allowed them to digitize frames of high-8 footage.
02:31Those digitized images were then color-corrected by the game's artists, and the backgrounds
02:36were painstakingly removed pixel by pixel.
02:39Then the digitized actor could be inserted into the games, with the various frames strung
02:44together as animations for the character.
02:46The technology had been used in other games, but nothing put it on the map the way Mortal
02:50Kombat did.
02:52Series co-creator Ed Boon told Game Informer,
02:55"...it had such a reach that I think, in some ways, it got credit for doing stuff that Midway
03:00was already doing."
03:03The characters of Mortal Kombat have kept fans returning to the game for over 30 years.
03:08Every game brings some new members into the Mortal Kombat family, but staples like Scorpion
03:13and Sub-Zero have returned for almost every game in the franchise.
03:17The game's characters became popular enough to inspire multiple movies, but back when
03:28Mortal Kombat was still just an idea at Midway Games, the developers thought a big movie
03:34star would help them sell their game.
03:36Ed Boon told Polygon that the team behind Mortal Kombat originally wanted action star
03:41Jean-Claude Van Damme to be part of the game.
03:44If the deal had gone through, Van Damme would have been the actor behind Johnny Cage, and
03:49fans would have been using him to rip enemies apart for the past three decades.
03:54Unfortunately, the Van Damme dream broke down in the early 90s.
03:58Instead of working with an established star, co-creator John Tobias hired local martial
04:03artists whom he'd wanted to work with on a film project that never came to fruition.
04:08The fact that the actors weren't instantly recognizable to most gamers might have actually
04:13helped with getting people invested in the character they were controlling on the arcade
04:17console.
04:18In a full-circle moment, however, JCVD eventually lent his likeness and voice to an alternate
04:24Johnny Cage in 2023's Mortal Kombat 1.
04:28It's not just the characters who have reappeared across various Mortal Kombat titles through
04:36the decade.
04:38It's also their iconic costumes.
04:40Raiden wears yellow, Sub-Zero wears blue.
04:43Raiden has an almost comically large hat on his head.
04:47The costumes give each character a more fleshed-out identity.
04:50Plus, they help make it easier to distinguish who's who in the middle of a heated battle.
04:55All those costumes were locally sourced, just like the game's actors.
04:59John Tobias and the martial artists he recruited pulled pieces from their own closets and gathered
05:04supplies and sports gear from stores in the area.
05:07They kept each character's look as simple as possible to make production as easy as
05:11possible, but they also made sure that each costume stood out on its own.
05:16The costumes themselves introduced new problems to the filming process.
05:20When in-game characters are drawings created by artists, costume pieces don't have to contend
05:26with real-world physics.
05:28But in front of the camera, gravity gets to be a troublemaker.
05:31Ed Boon shared a story of costuming woe on Twitter.
05:35Raiden's hat would fly off his head during most maneuvers, even with a rubber band helping
05:40to keep it in place.
05:41The costumes would eventually get more and more complex as the developers made more Mortal
05:46Kombat games, as can be seen in delightful behind-the-scenes footage of Mortal Kombat
05:513.
05:53Working with real actors in a studio meant that the Mortal Kombat team could easily come
05:58up with new ideas for character moves and implement them on the fly.
06:02Sometimes the restrictions of working in the real world forced new ideas into existence.
06:07In Raiden's case, Ed Boon wrote on Twitter that there was no easy way to keep his hat
06:12on his head during his stand-up move when he was supposed to leap from the ground onto
06:16his feet.
06:17Because of that, the developers gave Raiden the ability to teleport back to a standing
06:22position after being knocked down.
06:24Other times the team threw in a new move simply because someone on set came up with a good
06:28idea.
06:29Boon shared a clip that shows how Scorpion's spear move came into existence.
06:34It literally began with Boon saying,
06:36"'You know what would be a cool-ass move?'
06:39The team worked out the details from there.
06:41In the studio, they filmed Scorpion's animations for the move, and later they reused reaction
06:46frames for the other characters instead of filming new ones because they needed to save
06:50precious memory space for the game.
06:53That quick bit of riffing on set led to the move that's arguably most synonymous with
06:57the Mortal Kombat franchise."
07:01The Mortal Kombat team wasn't just making up fighting moves as they went along.
07:05As the original game got further into its development, the team also changed their plans
07:09to include a new character.
07:11Ed Boon shared the story of Sonya Blade's creation on Twitter.
07:15"'I'm Sonya Blade.
07:16If you hesitate, I'll take you down.'"
07:19Though Sonya is a quintessential Mortal Kombat character now, she almost didn't appear in
07:24the game at all.
07:26In the beginning, the game had only six characters, but after doing some testing, the team decided
07:31that they needed to expand the roster.
07:33Luckily, they already had a character in mind.
07:35Curtis Stryker was a Special Forces operative who got involved in the tournament at the
07:40heart of Mortal Kombat because of an undercover operation.
07:44As the developers continued fleshing out their ideas, they decided that the game should have
07:48a female fighter, so Curtis' story was given to Sonya, who shortly thereafter got her iconic
07:54leg-grab move.
07:56Over the years, though, the original character concept has continued to influence the game.
08:00His design transformed into Jax in Mortal Kombat 2, and in Mortal Kombat 3, his name
08:06was recycled into the character Stryker.
08:08Three for the price of one isn't a bad deal at all.
08:13The method through which Mortal Kombat used real actors to create its fights gave the
08:17series a uniquely cinematic feel from the very beginning.
08:21The franchise broke new ground back in 1992, and since then, it's continued to push the
08:26envelope in terms of graphics, gore, and the way actors bring video game characters to
08:31life.
08:32The original game's use of digitized graphics made it one of the earliest adopters of motion
08:37capture technology, but MoCap has gone through some significant changes in the decades since
08:42Mortal Kombat first shocked people across the globe.
08:45Naturally, the series has kept up with the latest developments.
08:48Modern Mortal Kombat games rely on real actors just as much as the original, but now they
08:53wear the dot-covered bodysuits that are typically associated with the MoCap process.
08:58Behind-the-scenes footage for 2011's Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat X shows that the
09:03series is keeping its gritty realism by hiring actors to play out the game's mini-fight animations.
09:10These days, the franchise also has much more of a focus on its story, and actors get to
09:15play out the cutscenes that gamers watch during their playthrough.
09:19MoCap is built into the very DNA of Mortal Kombat, so don't expect actors to be cut out
09:24of the process anytime soon.
09:28Mortal Kombat has come a long way from the days when it was being created with a small
09:32team of actors, a Hi-8 camera, and just a handful of computers.
09:37Though the core ethos behind the series is very much the same, the process of creating
09:42a Mortal Kombat game today looks a lot more like making a high-budget film than it once
09:47did.
09:48Some of the developers who worked on Mortal Kombat 11 showed off the overall design process
09:53they used on the game.
09:54It all started with detailed storyboards that plan out every character's move set.
09:59That's not to say there's never any room for a cool-ass move to be invented on the spot,
10:04but storyboarding helps the team plan out their vision and use their time more efficiently.
10:09With the storyboards made, the team begins working on the motion capture.
10:13After that, it's off to the animators, who transform the MoCap footage into rough character
10:17models before passing the rough draft along again for further editing and cinematic adjustments.
10:24More and more edits are made along the way, with more details added to both the animations
10:28and the character models, until eventually the finished product lands in the hands of
10:33Mortal Kombat fanatics around the globe.