Shang Tsung had a sword he’d use to decapitate players who lost, based on the video game Barbarian from 1987
NetherRealm Studios’ Ed Boon was asked about the origins of fatalities, which debuted in the 1992 arcade release for Mortal Kombat. The series has become synonymous with these finishing moves, so it’s interesting to hear how they first made their way into the franchise.
As it turns out, Shang Tsung was the only character who initially had this attack, and it was based on a 1987 video game called Barbarian.
“Shang Tsung, the final boss character in the game, he had this move where he’d defeat you, he had this big sword and he’d cut your head off,” said Mortal Kombat series co-creator, Ed Boon.
“That was based on an old game from [1987] called Barbarian, where somebody would actually cut your head off, I just couldn’t believe that I saw someone get their head cut off in a video game,” he said.
The rest of the cast getting these attacks was initially done as a test or joke of some sort, according to Boon.
“We were kind of duplicating that in a sense, so we had every character fall to their knees and to the ground, and we just removed their head, but it was just going to be the boss [Shang Tsung doing that],” he stated.
“Goofing around one time, we made Johnny Cage duck down and uppercut the guy, and we just used the head animation, used the falling down one, but [this time the player could perform it],” Boon noted.
“When we put that in, it was almost like testing it or a joke or shock or whatever, everybody lost their mind in the studio, half the people were saying ‘you can’t do that!’ and the other half were saying ‘you can’t not do that!’,” Boon relayed.
This wasn’t the first nor only time the original Mortal Kombat development team knew they had something special on their hands.
“When everybody’s talking about it, and there’s this buzz, you know you’re onto something,” Boon said. “We finished doing that [fatality] for Johnny Cage, and we just started saying let’s make [more of] these.
“There’s this cliché, where you rip someone’s heart out and show it to them before they die, it’s a martial arts movie cliché that we wanted to duplicate, we knew there was something really special about that,” Boon said.
“A lot of it was also due to Street Fighter, where [you’d get dizzy] and that drove me insane, when you’d go dizzy and you’d get a free hit on me,” he added.
“So we moved that to the end of the fight, where you’d already lost and are dizzy and the other guy is like ‘Now it’s time to put on a show!’,” Boon noted.
“I think that’s really when the game became Mortal Kombat, is when [fatalities] were put in there, along with all of the crazy blood, realistic visuals and characters, and the super fast gameplay, it just kind of pieced together,” Boon stated.
“There was this weird connection that I don’t think any of us could have predicted, that was going to be such a big part of the game, was this realism,” Boon added.
“Everybody would say ‘the characters are real on the screen’ and that was lightning, like magic striking,” Boon concluded.
Speaking of older Mortal Kombat games, Boon said a ways back that one day the stars are going to align and we’re going to make that happen in regards to remastering old titles.
You can also check out how a lot of Mortal Kombat’s special moves were added after the developers had captured the actors.
Quotes from Ed Boon transcribed from this video by Brian Tong.