When Ed Boon sent out the only résumé he ever wrote, at the age of 21, it had a line at the bottom mentioning an “interest in video games”. Williams, the Chicago pinball maker, offered him a job programming its tables. “I distinctly remember saying, ‘People program pinball machines?’” he told Game Informer in 2022. A few years later he and the artist John Tobias made Mortal Kombat, the digitised fighting game whose home versions were shown to the US Senate in 1993. More than thirty years on, Boon is still making Mortal Kombat games, and it is still his voice that shouts “Get over here!” when Scorpion throws his spear.
Fast facts
- Born: 1964, Chicago.
- Employers: Williams and Midway, from the late 1980s until Midway’s bankruptcy in 2009; NetherRealm Studios, owned by Warner Bros., since then.
- Pinball: programmer at Williams for about three years, including Black Knight 2000; a voice in about 20 tables.
- Video games: High Impact Football and Super High Impact, then the Mortal Kombat series from 1992, and Injustice: Gods Among Us (2013).
- Voice: Scorpion’s “Get over here!”
- Honours: inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame in 2022.
Programming pinball
Boon was born in Chicago and studied computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. At Williams he spent about three years in the pinball department. A pinball program runs the table’s rules, lights, sounds and speech, and Boon took the sound seriously. Brian Schmidt, who composed the music and sound for Black Knight 2000 (1989), later wrote that its programmer, Ed Boon, “was a stickler for detail in all aspects of the game, including audio” and put in “plenty of overtime” to keep the sound, the lights and the play tightly synchronised.
He also lent the tables his voice. “I’m a voice in about 20 pinball machines,” he said, the best known being the talking puppet in FunHouse. Downstairs, Eugene Jarvis and his team were making the video game NARC, and Boon “gravitated that way over time”. His first video game work was High Impact Football. The follow-up, Super High Impact Football, was made with John Newcomer, the designer of Joust, who told Retro Gamer that it was “a very high-earning sport game in the arcades”. After it, Newcomer recalled, “Ed wanted to do Mortal Kombat”, while their colleague Mark Turmell took the High Impact formula to basketball in NBA Jam.
Mortal Kombat
Mortal Kombat was Midway’s answer to Capcom’s Street Fighter II, made by a team of four led by Boon, its programmer, and Tobias. “Mortal Kombat was put together in an incredibly fast time,” Boon told Retro Gamer. Its fighters were digitised from video of real actors, and the loser could be killed with a fatality. The Mortal Kombat entry tells the story of the game, its home versions and the 1993 Senate hearings that led to the ESRB.
Boon’s voice is on the soundtrack. Describing how Scorpion’s spear move came about, he said: “Something comes to mind, you say it out loud, walk through it, and put it into the game.” The move, with its “Get over here!”, became perhaps the series’ best known, “and it’s weird hearing my voice say that line.” The creators wrote themselves into the games in other ways too. The hidden fighter Noob Saibot, introduced in Mortal Kombat II, takes his name from their surnames spelt backwards, as Nintendo Power pointed out in 1995, and Nintendo Official Magazine told readers to look closely at the trees in Mortal Kombat II to find Boon’s face grinning out at them.
Talking to the players
The sequels made Boon a public figure. In late 1994 he began writing a “Kombat Kolumn” for the British magazine GamesMaster, and in 1995 he invited its reviewer to Chicago to play Mortal Kombat 3 before anyone else. Asked where the fatalities came from, he explained that ideas were never the problem: players sent in letters and drawings full of them. Memory was. Mortal Kombat 3 had more than 30 fatalities to fit into 18 megabytes of image memory, and a fatality with entirely new graphics for every character would have used up the lot. “The challenge isn’t to think of them, I could think of one off of the top of my head, it’s to make them feasible.” He admitted he was never satisfied with a finished game: “I’m very hard on myself in that respect.”
He was also selling the new consoles. Mortal Kombat 3 was converted for Sony’s PlayStation alongside the coin-op, and Boon, “the man behind the arcade game”, told Edge that “the PlayStation version will be the first one to be released and it’s going to be awesome”.
After Tobias
When Mortal Kombat 4 moved the fighters into 3D in 1997, Boon was wary. He thought that the complex animation in Capcom’s 3D Street Fighter EX got in the way of the play, so he kept the new game’s fighting close to its 2D predecessors, running on a new arcade board called Zeus. Tobias left Midway in 1999 to found Studio Gigante with other members of the team, according to Retro Gamer, leaving Boon in charge of the series. The spin-off Mortal Kombat: Special Forces flopped. Boon’s answer, Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance (2002), gave each fighter two fighting styles and a weapon, and brought the series back to good reviews. Deception (2004) and Armageddon (2006) followed. “I think the main reason we’ve managed to sell big numbers this far has been because we are not afraid to make dramatic changes to Mortal Kombat,” he told Retro Gamer in 2007.
He also had a sense of humour about the series. On his own website he once announced Mortal Kombat Trilogy: Nitro Edition, a game that did not exist, for machines such as the Atari 2600 and the Apple IIc. Digital Press included it in a round-up of video game hoaxes.
NetherRealm
Midway went bankrupt in 2009. Warner Bros. bought Mortal Kombat and most of the company, and the Chicago studio Boon worked in became NetherRealm Studios, with Boon as its creative director. Its Mortal Kombat of 2011 went back to fighting on a flat 2D plane. “We thought it was time to reset the clock,” Boon told Edge. NetherRealm then made Injustice: Gods Among Us (2013), a fighting game with DC Comics’ superheroes. Edge suspected that it “was the game NetherRealm wanted to make all along”. The studio carried on with Mortal Kombat 11 in 2019 and Mortal Kombat 1, which restarted the series’ story, in 2023. In 2022 the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences inducted Boon into its Hall of Fame.
Sources
- Andrew Reiner, “Ed Boon On His AIAS Hall Of Fame Induction And Career In Video Games And Pinball”, Game Informer, 24 February 2022 (web, secondary; Boon’s own words): the résumé, programming pinball, three years in pinball, about 20 pinball voices and the FunHouse puppet, Jarvis and NARC, High Impact Football, Scorpion’s spear and his voice, the Hall of Fame. https://gameinformer.com/2022/02/24/ed-boon-on-his-aias-hall-of-fame-induction-and-career-in-video-games-and-pinball
- Brian Schmidt, “Interactive Audio in Black Knight 2000: The Importance of Integration”, Game Developer, 4 November 2014 (web, secondary; the game’s composer): Boon as programmer of Black Knight 2000 and his care over its audio. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/audio/interactive-audio-in-black-knight-2000-the-importance-of-integration
- Shirley Gomez, “Meet Ed Boon: The Dominican-American visionary behind Mortal Kombat”, ¡Hola! USA, 13 October 2023 (web, secondary): birth date and place, studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. https://www.hola.com/us/celebrities/20231013351537/the-dominican-american-visionary-creator-of-mortal-kombat/
- Retro Gamer issue 116, July 2013, pp. 37–38, feature on the making of NBA Jam: John Newcomer on Super High Impact Football with Boon, and Boon wanting to make Mortal Kombat.
- Retro Gamer issue 40, 2007, pp. 27–33, “Blood Simple: the history of Mortal Kombat”: the four-man team, “an incredibly fast time”, Noob Saibot’s name, Mortal Kombat 4, Street Fighter EX and the Zeus hardware, Tobias leaving in 1999 for Studio Gigante, Special Forces, Deadly Alliance, Deception, Armageddon, and Boon on making “dramatic changes”.
- Nintendo Power issue 79, December 1995, p. 92: Noob Saibot named after “Boon and Tobias, the game’s creators”.
- Nintendo Official Magazine issue 58, July 1997: Noob Saibot’s name from Boon’s and Tobias’s surnames spelt backwards; Boon’s face in the trees in Mortal Kombat II.
- Nintendo Power issue 85, June 1996: “Ed Boon and John Tobias, the creators of MK at Williams”.
- GamesMaster issue 29, May 1995, pp. 14–21: the Kombat Kolumn, the invitation to Chicago, and Boon’s interview on fatalities, memory and Mortal Kombat 3.
- Edge issue 23, August 1995: Mortal Kombat 3 on the PlayStation, Boon quoted.
- Digital Press issue 53, July 2003: the Mortal Kombat Trilogy: Nitro Edition hoax on Boon’s website.
- Edge issue 225, March 2011: NetherRealm’s Mortal Kombat. Issue 249, January 2013: Boon as “series co-creator and a creative director at NetherRealm Studios” on rebooting the series. Issue 254, June 2013: Injustice: Gods Among Us review.
- Wireframe issue 14, May 2019: Mortal Kombat 11 review (NetherRealm Studios, Warner Bros.).
- For Mortal Kombat 1 (2023), Midway’s bankruptcy and the sale to Warner Bros., see the Mortal Kombat and Midway entries and their sources.