Video games had a big showing at San Diego Comic-Con 2023, with panels for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 in the legendary Hall H, new details on Stars Wars Outlaws, and the making of the upcoming Immortals of Aveum. Another game that had a big presence at this year’s ‘Con was Mortal Kombat 1, the newest entry in Netherrealm Studios’ iconic gory fighting franchise, which also serves as a soft reboot for the game’s story. We had a chance to sit down and chat with some of the developers and voice actors of the game during roundtable press interviews at SDCC.

Edit: Pardon the audio, our equipment wasn’t working properly!

Ed Boon, co-creator of Mortal Kombat

When asked about accessibility, Boon referenced the recently released Street Fighter 6 and its innovative Modern control scheme:

. . . [w]e toyed around with that, we never really quite pulled the trigger on it . . . [b]elieve it or not, some people can not go down, toward, A . . . that was actually a lot of the reason why in the arcade game, a lot of our moves were tap tap in one direction. Everybody can do left left, not everybody can do Dragon Punch [Ryu and Ken’s Shoryuken]. So we’re always talking about it, but this game we didn’t do it.

Thiago Gomes, Art Development Director

I asked Thiago about the process of animating the game’s signature blood, guts, and bones:

So early on, on the environment side, one of the things we really wanted to convey was after a fight, we wanted you to be able to look at the environment and be able to tell what happened; where did the fight take place? If you look at the environment and it’s really bloody in the right corner, you know most of the fight took place here. And we’ve gotten to a place fidelity-wise where we even have different blood droplets depending on how the character gets hit. We have drippy blood that drips out slowly . . . we have blood that splatters across pieces of the environment. So being able to [tell the story of the fight] was something that was really important to us.

Dominic Cianciolo, Story Director and Kelly Hu, voice of Li Mei

Dominic was asked how the team goes about balancing the classic characters with the new in a narrative sense, and how to handle that balance with this new, rebooted story:

It’s definitely hard. We have 24 characters in the game, and not all of them can have the same amount of screentime, and so you’re trying to make things pop as much as possible. So what we try to do is not only look at just the experience in the story, but also to the other storytelling that’s in the game, whether it’s through the intro dialogue . . . or the ladder endings that are part of our single player experience traditionally . . . it’s a real challenge because the roster gets decided not just by myself, we got Ed [Boon], we ask everyone in the studio who [they want to see come back] and the fans, who do they want to see come back, and it’s sort of putting all together and making a stew out of it.

Kelly Hu, who was announced as the voice of returning fighter Li Mei during the Mortal Kombat 1 panel at San Diego Comic-Con (she also voiced D’Vorah in Mortal Kombat X and 11), discusses her villainous roles compared to playing a more moral character like Li Mei:

It’s so much more fun to be a bad person, you know, maybe just get it out of your system so you can be a good person in real life . . . But I just feel like you can have so much more fun with it.

Panel Announcements

There was also a panel open to fans during the second day of Comic-Con, showcasing a gameplay trailer officially announcing the return of Li Mei, Tanya, and Baraka to the main roster, as well as Darrius as a Kameo fighter. Panel-goers were also treated to a snippet of the story mode, which showed off classic characters Motaro and General Reiko; it’s unclear whether either of these characters will be playable. During fan Q&A, Ed Boon was asked about DLC characters and told the fan to stick around; at the end, they announced the first slate of DLC: Series mainstays Ermac, Quan Chi, Takeda, as well as DC’s Peacemaker, Invincible‘s Omni-Man and The Boys‘ Homelander, confirming long-gestating rumors.

Mortal Kombat 1 releases September 19, 2023 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Windows, and Nintendo Switch. An beta was announced as well, running from August 18th through the 21st for fans who pre-order the game.

Check out more of Temple of Geek’s gaming coverage from SDCC below!

Star Wars Outlaws at San Diego Comic-Con 2023

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 at San Diego Comic-Con 2023