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NetherRealm Studios

Midway's Mortal Kombat team, under Warner Bros.

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When Midway went bankrupt in 2009, Warner Bros. bought Mortal Kombat and kept the Chicago team that made it. Renamed NetherRealm Studios in April 2010, with Ed Boon as creative director, it rebooted the series in 2011, made the DC Comics fighting games Injustice and Injustice 2, and has made every Mortal Kombat since.

NetherRealm Studios is the team that made Mortal Kombat at Midway, under a new name and a new owner. Midway filed for bankruptcy in February 2009, and that July Warner Bros. bought Mortal Kombat and most of the company. It kept the Chicago studio where Ed Boon had worked on the series since 1992, called it WB Games Chicago, and in April 2010 renamed it NetherRealm, after one of the series’ own realms. “The name was more because we wanted an identity,” the studio’s director of engineering, Alan Villani, told Game Informer, “and we figured the MK stuff was buried inside of Midway.” Under Warner Bros. the studio has made a Mortal Kombat or a DC Comics fighting game every two to four years since 2011.

Fast facts

  • Formed: April 2010, when Warner Bros. renamed WB Games Chicago, the former Midway studio in Chicago.
  • Owner: Warner Bros. Games (formerly Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment).
  • Leaders: Ed Boon, series co-creator, as creative director (later titled chief creative officer); Shaun Himmerick as studio head.
  • Games: Mortal Kombat (2011), Injustice: Gods Among Us (2013), Mortal Kombat X (2015), Injustice 2 (2017), Mortal Kombat 11 (2019), Mortal Kombat 1 (2023), and mobile versions of both series.

Mortal Kombat, 2011

The team’s last game at Midway, Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe (2008), had put DC Comics’ superheroes in the ring with the Mortal Kombat fighters. “The biggest lesson we learned with MKvDC was that there was an opportunity for two separate games that each could embrace their roots without compromising the other,” Boon said later. The first NetherRealm game went back to those roots. “We thought it was time to reset the clock,” Boon told Edge. Mortal Kombat (2011), for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, returned the fighting to a flat 2D plane and brought the fatalities back in, as Edge put it, “a more cheerfully gratuitous form than ever before”.

Edge’s review was mixed. It found the game loyal to “mechanics that, even when the original hit arcades, felt dated”, but noted the new X-Ray attacks and a story mode of about eight hours, a lot of single-player play for a fighting game. Warner Bros. marketed it heavily, and according to the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences it outsold every earlier game in the series. A PlayStation Vita version followed in 2012, which Retro Gamer called a “fun reboot” that “benefits massively from the move to a portable format”.

Injustice

Warner Bros. owns DC Comics, and NetherRealm’s next game used the licence without Mortal Kombat attached. Injustice: Gods Among Us (2013) gave the studio more than 20 DC characters to set against each other. Edge suspected it “was the game NetherRealm wanted to make all along”: the licence suited the studio’s “template: accessible fighting games with a wealth of singleplayer content, including lengthy story modes”, and its “cartoonish slapstick” was a change from Mortal Kombat’s gore. An earlier Edge preview had noted the Joker’s custard pies and Batman running opponents over in the Batmobile. The review called it “a sensitive use of the DC licence, and… a fine fighting game in its own right”.

From then on the studio alternated between the two series: Mortal Kombat X in 2015, Injustice 2 in 2017 and Mortal Kombat 11 in 2019. Wireframe gave Mortal Kombat 11 70%, calling it “idiotically violent” but fun. Warner Bros. announced in July 2021 that it had sold more than 12 million copies, and that the series as a whole had passed 73 million. Mortal Kombat 1 (2023), which restarted the series’ story, broke the pattern, the first time the studio had gone from one Mortal Kombat straight to another. At its launch Warner Bros. put the series’ sales at more than 80 million; in January 2025 Boon said Mortal Kombat 1 had sold more than five million copies, and the studio had added a story expansion, Khaos Reigns.

Working conditions and cuts

Shortly after Mortal Kombat 11 came out in 2019, former contract staff described years of heavy crunch on the studio’s earlier games, broken promises of permanent jobs, and offensive treatment of temporary workers, particularly women, in an investigation by the website USgamer. One said they had worked 220 hours in a month. The studio replied that it took “these matters very seriously” and was “constantly” taking “steps to reduce crunch time for our employees”. The reports were widely discussed: writing in Wireframe that May, the organisers of a new games workers’ union in Britain listed NetherRealm among the companies whose treatment of staff had made the news in the past year.

NetherRealm also ran mobile games, including Mortal Kombat Mobile, the mobile Injustice 2 and Mortal Kombat: Onslaught (2023). In July 2024 former employees reported that the mobile team had been laid off, and the studio closed Onslaught that October, a year after launch. In June 2025, when Warner Bros. Games reorganised around four series including Mortal Kombat and DC, NetherRealm’s studio head Shaun Himmerick was put in charge of development for both.

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