Injustice: Gods Among Us won’t be the first time the House that Mortal Kombat Built has worked with comic icons from DC’s stable but it does mark somewhat of a sea change for a team of developers previously exclusively focused on the Mortal Kombat series. Morale remains high at NetherRealm Studios after the enthusiastic reception of 2011’s Mortal Kombat but there’s also a great deal of excitement around the fact Injustice is a brand new project for them.

“Well, it’s interesting,” says industry veteran Ed Boon, creative director at NetherRealm Studios. “Some people forget that we’ve been doing Mortal Kombat games for, you know, some guys in the team, 15 years or something like that. So the idea of doing something different when you’ve been doing the same kinda theme for so long is very exciting, very invigorating, and a lot of the guys in the team are fans of it.”

“At the same time, like you said, the last Mortal Kombat game got a lot of positive response. We’re excited about two games now; we can’t wait to do this game but we also can’t wait to jump on and try to top that last Mortal Kombat game with something new, but right now our focus is Injustice and we’re very excited about it.”

Boon is visibly relaxed, laughing when I point out he still looks like Pete Sampras. (“Yeah, I know. A lot of people tell me that. It’s funny; Pete Sampras married the woman who played Sonya Blade in the Mortal Kombat movie. So that’s our little triangle. Pete Sampras looks like me, and he married Mortal Kombat.”) If he’s feeling any pressure, he’s not showing it here.

Fighting game fans the world over are admired for their dedication but noted for being difficult to please. The pressure when building a fighting game, however, doesn’t come from building a game to meet the specifications of the hardcore. It comes from building a game for all potential players.

“The fighting game fans, the aficionados, the hardcore guys, you know, the reality is, in terms of the count, the number of them out there is very small,” says Boon. “A very small percentage of the population can play fighting games on a competitive level, and counts frames and does all that. It just takes a ton of time and practice; it’s almost like a sport.”

“But they’re very small in number but they’re the most vocal… they have a presence that’s way bigger than their number. They are a group of the audience that you need to satisfy. But the other 95 per cent of the audience, they’re the ones that you have to make sure you have features that they can have fun with. Because if you have to tell somebody, ‘Okay, now go practise this, and keep practising’, most people will just go away and say, ‘I don’t wanna practise this game; I just wanna have fun, drink beer with my buddies and have a good time throwing cars at people.’

“So we really need to accommodate both of them and have features that are for the fighting game guys and also for the casual guys to have fun.”

I spoke to Boon several years ago, prior to the release of Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, and he explained a little of the process regarding how they came up with new and quirky fatalities. Injustice doesn’t have fatalities, of course (“We’re not going to be cutting Batman’s head off,” chuckles Boon), but it does have incredibly over-the-top power moves. Superman, for instance, can punch opponents into outer space. I ask Boon how zany do the meetings get when someone’s saying, ‘Let’s have Superman uppercut a guy through the Earth’s atmosphere!’ How insane does a power move have to be before you rule it out?

“I don’t think there’s anything we rule out other than the time,” he says. “Like if somebody suggests something that would take a minute to happen, we’d go, ‘You know what? That’s a great idea, but the player doesn’t wanna wait a minute before they can start playing the game again.’ So everything has to be concise [as well as] big and over-the-top.”

“The Superman one was one of the first ones that was suggested and it certainly set the bar. We knew we would never get as outrageous as that, but we said, ‘Let’s get as close as we can’ and then, in general, everything will be a bigger experience. There are some really crazy ones that I can’t wait for people to see, that are pretty ridiculous; they’re on the scale of the Superman one. Unfortunately I’d love to be able to mention them but I think when people see them they’ll get an idea of how close we tried to get to that ultimate Superman one.”

On the topic of Superman, Boon makes a great point regarding the challenge of making a character with virtually unlimited power work in a fighting game. Boon is a big fan of Marvel vs. Capcom but finds it interesting few people find Chun-Li’s ability to go eye-to-thigh with The Hulk as troublesome as they find Superman duking it out with other heroes in video games. The first place people go with Superman in a fighting game is, ‘Wait isn’t he invincible? How is this gonna work?’ We ask Boon what is it about Superman that makes people gravitate instantly towards that question.

“Yeah, I think Superman is, probably more than any character, associated with just extreme strength,” says Boon. “I mean, I remember in the comic books it got so far at one point I remember reading one where he was pushing a plane and I remember thinking, ‘Okay, they’ve gone too far.’”

“And then at some point, I don’t know if was one of the reboots, they scaled him down, like, it would actually take an effort to pick up a car. He was still strong, but he wasn’t, like, pushing an entire planet. If you can push a planet, you can kill anybody! So it just got so silly, but at the same time we did have to do something in our story to talk it down because the first question is always, ‘Why would Superman NOT win every single fight?’”

The character roster is padded with iconic DC superheroes but Boon feels it will be the arenas themselves that may become Injustice’s defining element.

“When people start playing the game and they realise that there’s this big opportunity in this part of the arena… and it’s a different opportunity based on the character I’m playing, when they get that and they start caring about where they are in the arena, and which arena, I think they’re gonna realise what separates this game from other ones,” he says. “That’s basically the environments and using big objects and doing superhero type things with these environments. If you’re Superman and you’re in the corner you know, ‘I could pick up this car and slam it on this guy’ and that’s a cool feeling. That, to me, is what I think will ultimately be the identity of this game.”

It creates a balancing challenge, but NetherRealm has risen to it.

“It’s very much the biggest challenge,” admits Boon. “Any time you add variables like this, like, you know we have these two characters and you say, ‘Okay, the arena affects how you’re going to play. And there are multiple arenas. And there are gadget characters and power characters.’ The more variables you layer on, the more complex it will be to [balance].

“If there’s a character who’s just perceived as weak you don’t just give them a special move, it’s like, ‘How are they gonna interact in the Batcave, in the Fortress of Solitude, in Gotham City? How do you raise their fighting abilities within all of these arenas?’ It’s a huge challenge.

“We’re going to have to spend a huge amount of time just testing the game, forever,” he laughs.

Boon is very pleased with how easy working with DC has been and admires their willingness to allow people to reimagine their characters for products such as Batman: Arkham City and Injustice.

“I’ve been very impressed with how cooperative they’ve been,” he says. “I think that they just basically realise that if you give that freedom that you’re gonna get a game that will be a better game.”

“Giving the Rocksteady guys that kind of freedom with Arkham City produced Arkham City. And I think Arkham City is probably considered the greatest superhero game ever made… I don’t think they would’ve gotten that if they’d put the clamps on them and not let them try new stuff with that game.”

 Luke is Games Editor at IGN AU. You can chat to him about games, cars and why Batman is a million times cooler than Superman on IGN here or find him and the rest of the Australian team by joining the IGN Australia Facebook community.

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