This
week's episode of
Major Nelson's podcast features
Mortal Kombat Creative Director,
Ed Boon. For whose who don't know,
Major Nelson is the nickname of
Larry Hryb who is the
Xbox Live Director of Programming at
Microsoft's Games Division. You can listen to the podcast directly from
MajorNelson.com or via
iTunes as well. The portion of the show with Ed Boon starts from 24 minutes in.
Larry and Ed discuss a lot about how Ed got started in the industry over 15 years ago. Ed discusses how he started programming pinball games for Midway in assembly language on the
8 bit Motorola 6800 processor. Then in 1990 he moved over to the video game side of the company. He did programming work, this time doing programming on the High Impact Football series of games before doing the first
Mortal Kombat game in 1992. The rest is history.
Ed touches the differences between game development back then, with a small team of four people compared to the massive effort that goes into current generation games these days. For instance, the core team on
Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe was 45 people. If you include all the cinematic team along with those who assisted in development it accounts for almost 100 people involved.
Some good news was also mentioned. Ed teases that they are just now finalizing the announcements for the upcoming
Downloadable Content (DLC) for
Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe. Ed said they are trying to make fans of both universes happy by giving them each the most desired character. So we expect that news to land sometime in the next month or so, and the DLC itself to follow quite closely.
The main point of Ed's visit was to plug the upcoming
Game With Developers that is this Friday. So be sure to remember to practice and prepare, as it's just a few days away now.
