Mortal Kombat had a HUGE influence on me growing up. I remember the first time I saw it in the arcade – I almost crapped myself! I was like, “Look what they did to that guy! I’m out of quarters! When well I be able to play this at home?” Then I learned about Mortal Monday, the official launch day when the arcade game came out on the SNES and Genesis. I was a poor college kid at the time, but I circled the date for two reasons: I couldn’t afford it, so I needed to reserve it a month in advance at the video store; and September 13 1993 was my 21st birthday! So instead of going to the bar on my 21st, I ended up sitting with my friends playing MK all night long.

Sometimes, life has a strange way of working out. Here I am, 17 years later, having been able to work on the incredible God of War series … and then one day we get approached to include Kratos in the new Mortal Kombat! This was a complete no-brainer. I remember interviewing at PlayStation eight years ago and seeing Kratos in the very early stages of God of War 1 and thinking, “This guy looks like he was pulled straight from MK!” Which to me, was a good thing. One of the things that I always felt separated Mortal Kombat from other fighters was its character design. When you combine this with Kratos’ attitude and tendency for violence, it’s a match made in heaven!

Another thing that made this collaboration a good fit is that our studios have ties with one another. Several of us at Santa Monica used to work at Midway, including Adam Puhl (Lead Combat Design), Bruno Velazquez (Lead Animator), Chris Sutton (Lead Environment), as well as me, so we all knew Ed and had a relationship with members of his team. It was easy for all of us to get on the same page. It also made the decision on our end to work together because we trust them fully and we know that they will deliver on the promise to make this the most complete and authentic Mortal Kombat yet.

So for me personally, this is a really cool story. Mortal Kombat influenced me when I was younger in many ways, and it is still influencing me today. You can see this plainly by looking at God of War III. I was always encouraging the team to push the gore and violence in the kills, and a large part of that was the way MK struck me when I college kid. It’s one of those games that changed the industry, and is why I bet a lot of people have the “I remember MK because” stories. It is an honor to be involved with it.

Just to give a little perspective on what we were going for with this trailer, we really wanted to sell the high action of the game and put together snippets of several of the big moments. Everything is pulled straight from the game – there is no trickery, etc. Everything is running in “real time.” There are no “cinematic” sequences here, meaning this is all gameplay.

Towards the end of the trailer we reveal some of the moments from our January media event. If you look closely you can see Kratos on the arm of Gaia fighting against the “Leviathan” water creature, giving a sneak peek of the scale in our game. I am very proud of the work our team has done and how this trailer showcases it. The final game has a ton more that is not shown here and I can’t wait to see what everyone thinks about it!