(techno music)
- Hey, this is Paul Acevedo with Windows Central.
- Hello, this is Ed Boon, I'm creative director
at Nether Realm Studios.
- Ed Boon, you have a storied game development history.
I understand you're responsible for
the Mortal Kombat franchise, co-creator.
- I am one of the co-creators of Mortal Kombat, yes.
- Awesome, so you've have kind of a life-long
interest in fighting games?
- Not life-long, but certainly the past 25 years.
Mortal Kombat actually is celebrating 25 years this year,
which is fun.
- Not bad.
So on the subject of Mortal Kombat,
I see it said online a lot of the time that
there have been no good video game movies.
But, how do you feel about the first Mortal Kombat movie,
I thought that was pretty good.
- I agree.
And as a matter of fact, I remember when it came out,
that it was kind of called out as that.
Like, I remember people saying, "oh wow,
"finally a good video game adaptation movie."
And I was happy with it, too.
And it did really well.
It was actually, at the time,
it was the second biggest August opening
in movie history.
But that was a long time ago.
(laughs)
- Not bad.
Well I mean, you must be really proud
to have had something you worked on adapted into a movie,
that's quite an accomplishment.
- Yeah, it was surreal.
I remember going onto the set and just going,
"I can't believe they're making a movie out of this."
In a very good way, it was a very surreal experience.
- And now, you're working on Injustice Two,
which is in a way sort of based on movies,
or at least characters who appear in enough movies.
- Yeah, it's based on, you know, comic book characters
that will eventually turn into movies.
And games, and animated shows.
And we're doing a game based on that.
So it's full circle about two or three times.
- So before we talk about part two specifically,
how did you guys end up with Injustice?
- You know, we actually did a game called
Mortal Kombat Versus DC Universe,
way back, I don't know how many years it's been now,
eight years or something like that, at least.
And when we did that game there was certainly a challenge
with Mortal Kombat as an M rated game,
and the DC Universe, we're not gonna,
cut Superman's head off or anything crazy like that.
So there were certain decisions that we had to make
to keep it a T rated game.
And I think Mortal Kombat players really wanted
their Mortal Kombat game.
So we finished that game with two things,
we knew two things.
One is, we wanted to do a pure Mortal Kombat experience,
which was Mortal Kombat Nine.
And then we also knew that we wanted to do a pure
DC fighting game, you know, over the top experience.
And that was Injustice One.
And that really kind of planted the seeds for the more
contemporary versions of Injustice and Mortal Kombat.
- Tell us about some of the differences then,
with Injustice Two.
- Oh, there's the differences that you would hope for,
or expect, or more characters, you know,
bigger roster, new story, improved graphics,
all of the things that you would want in a sequel.
But then the big thing that we're adding,
which is, you know, we always wanna make our games
have something that people were not expecting,
that's our gear system.
That's the whole system of costume pieces for
every character.
Hundreds of costume pieces for every character
that you can equip on your character,
and change their look and their game play
and make your own customized version of
Superman, Batman, the Flash, Wonder Woman,
all these iconic DC characters.
And that's the big difference with Injustice Two.
- So how do we acquire these new pieces of gear?
- By playing the game.
If you play the single-player game,
if you play the story mode, you're getting gear.
You play the multiverse you're getting gear.
You play online against other people, you're getting gear.
So you're basically, it's almost like you're rewarded gear
for just playing the game and your experience on the game
and then you start using that gear to kind of
craft your own character.
So it's a great, kind of, cycle that you just
get for normally playing the game.
- And speaking of customization,
can we customize the color of the gear
or anything like that?
- Yes, you can, yeah.
We have these things, we're calling them shaders,
and, which is actually kind of a common term
with a number of games, where you can kinda
pick a different color palette of sorts,
so you can get a darker palette,
or a silver palette of Superman,
or a gold-like palette of Superman or Flash.
And those will let you pick
a completely different look.
And then there's what we're calling premier skins,
which is changing you to a different character.
So Supergirl can be changed to Power Girl.
Hal Jordan, the Green Lantern, can be changed to
John Stewart Green Lantern,
and Flash can be changed to
the Reverse Flash so it's a lot of really cool,
again, personalization things that we've put in the game.
- So to get one of these premier skins,
are you piecing it together or do you get it all at once?
- Well, you get, a premier skin is kind of like a shader.
So you be rewarded it,
you can, they can be dropped in what's called a loot drop.
So, as you play the game
you can earn these different shaders and premier skins.
- I know that one way you unlock things
is through the new multiverse mode.
Can you tell us about that?
- Absolutely.
Multiverse is, it is a mode where there are
different challenges throughout the game.
And these challenges only last for a certain
period of time.
The challenges will sometimes give you
exclusive gear if you accomplish them.
Sometimes they need certain gear just
to even enter it and qualify for it.
And they are always changing.
Some of them will last three hours.
Some of them will last seven days.
Some of them will last one day.
Some of them, you know.
So every time you turn the game on,
there's a different challenge to achieve.
And unique gear for that challenge.
So that's what's so cool,
you can log on every day,
you can basically turn your game on
and you have a brand new challenge
that will give you unique gear.
- And are they gonna keep refreshing
throughout the life of the game?
- Absolutely, yeah.
- So how many characters will be in the game at launch?
- The game will launch with 28 of the original cast.
And you will also be able to download
dark side or, if you preorder the game, you get
dark side for free.
But then throughout the course of the game's life,
we're gonna release nine more characters
about every few weeks.
So it's gonna go all the way out
through the summer, into the fall,
with new characters, it's gonna be great.
- Can you tell us about the process of selecting
these characters to be in the game?
- There's a number of factors.
One is what does the story need,
what do we want to see.
We never got a chance last time to do
Firestorm, Dr. Fate, Captain Cold,
these characters that we really wanted to get
into the game.
And what, the feedback that we get from players.
The people who loved the first game,
they're, you know, tons of them were saying,
"I want Dr. Fate,
"I want Cheetah,
"I want Swamp Thing.
"I want all these kind of iconic characters."
That we just simply didn't have
the ability or the bandwidth to do
in Injustice One,
were given those fan services with this game.
- Yeah, I notice there's a lot of characters from
the current CW, DC shows.
Was that a conscious choice?
- I think those characters in general
are a lot more in the forefront,
so we knew.
I will never make a DC game that doesn't have
the Flash in it.
Absolutely, Supergirl was,
being a lot more prominent now,
so we had to include her,
we wanted to include her.
And she plays a huge part in our story,
which is great.
So just other influences,
like what comic books are hot,
what animated shows did well,
and what people wanna see, basically.
- Were there any characters you would have liked
to have included but weren't able to get
permission to use?
- No, permission really wasn't
the factor.
Like last time, it was,
you can only do a finite number of characters.
DC has probably in the hundreds of characters,
so we clearly don't have the ability
to do every single one of them.
It's just going further and further into the roster,
trying to represent the most visibly represented
characters in the various forms of media.
- You mentioned Supergirl.
I remember that Superman was basically the villain
in the first game.
Is Supergirl also on the antagonistic side,
or is she more of a heroic character?
- She is the stuck in the middle character,
which is really cool,
and there's a great dynamic that happens with that.
I don't wanna give too much of the story away,
but there's a great dynamic there.
- Okay, well, it was really great meeting you,
and thank you for telling us about Injustice 2.
- Thanks for this.
- All right guys, thanks for watching our video.
Don't forget to follow me.
And whatever you do, don't hate, appreciate.