Ed Boon talks 30 years of Mortal Kombat

blog.playstation.com:

Ed Boon is practically gaming royalty. He’s been a working designer since the late 80s, starting with pinball and quickly moving to arcade games. And then he and three other folks created Mortal Kombat, and the rest is history.

The legendary fighting series hits the big 3-0 tomorrow, a date that marks the release of the original Mortal Kombat arcade cabinets on October 8, 1992. And Boon has worked on Mortal Kombat for every one of those 30 years, a highly unusual feat in video game design.

To celebrate the occasion, I caught up with the affable creator, now Chief Creative Officer for Mortal Kombat & NetherRealm Studios, to talk about his deep roots with the series, reminisce on his career developing MK, and try to get a sense of where it goes from here.

PlayStation.Blog: Where does 2022 find Mortal Kombat?

Ed Boon: Well, it finds it celebrating 30 years of being around, being in the public eye. Obviously…we haven’t made the last one. I guess that’s probably the closest I can say without revealing too much. 

The biggest surprise for me is that players have come along and stayed with us for so long. And so the fact that they’ve stuck with us all this time really invigorates us with each iteration of the game.

PSB: With Mortal Kombat turning 30, are you reflecting on your life and how it intersects with the series?

EB: Not so much of my life, but certainly on my career making games. Mortal Kombat is kind of like different forms of school for me now. The arcade days were like grade school, and the 3D games were, you know, middle school or high school. 

And now the most recent games — Mortal Kombat 9, MKX, and MK11 — are kind of like college or graduate school. I think of my career as different chapters because it’s been so