Mortal Kombat vs DC - What Happened?

[Music] hello Mortal Kombat ins I see you've come for another crazy catastrophic carnage filled kepis ode of cook happened forget to forget this this is getting dumb as you can see from the title we are reaching deep into the chest cavity once again to pull out another bloody still-beating bungle from Mortal Kombat's font in history first things first though thanks the flophouse VIP big boss tray for nominating this particularly messy chapter in Edie Boone's life now I know what some of you were probably thinking hey MK vs. DC it wasn't that bad well listen it's not just about the censored violent content or the wonky gimmicky gameplay systems for the various other things that her going to get into it's more about the package as a whole including the game that we didn't get so let's rewind back to 2006 aka the drop charms for fighting game fans where you'd find things like this that and especially these mortal kombat armageddon came out pretty late in the sixth generation of consoles with Xbox and ps2 virgins unleashing in that October already a year into the Xbox 360s life and right on the cusp of the ps3s 599 u.s. dollars the ps3 launched the MK team even slapped together a Wii version some seven months later that uses these hilarious motion controls ooh I'd love to play someone with these so easy in fact that even your grandmother will be throwing spears teleporting and doing fatalities moving along Midway having gone through a rough few years of Midway we're not exactly swinging into hi going into the HD era in fact during the 2000s there one consists bright spot was MORTAL KOMBAT so would be no surprise the next entering the series was quickly punted production after the release of Armageddon in fact Mortal Kombat elder God Eddie boom-boom was more than happy to speak about these early days regarding their first high-definition fighting game our goal graphically with this game is to be as gritty as possible to me when I saw Gears of War I was like holy that that's the look that we've been talking about visually that's what we want to do when asked about how players could expect the game mechanics to change and also offer we're not going to have the three fighting styles we're not gonna have the same punches and kicks on the same kind of control scheme everything is getting trashed or reinventing everything from the ground up we really think that's what's needed Oh what and we don't get the powerup thing anymore and creative fatality the little blinking lights mid-air cop unfortunately there's no real videos or any pre-production assets for this version of Mortal Kombat 8 but former Midway employee Vincent Prost did release this concept art for a pitch that would see the Mortal Kombat universe being rebooted and it's close to the dark and serious tone that edy described now this art was confirmed to have been created in and around 2008 so wasn't exactly part of the original pre-production phase during 2006 but it's as close as we can get to see what this darker entry might have looked like eventually as the months passed news started to dry up with Ed's lips becoming increasingly tighter until he broke that silence with an ominous new statement we're doing something with the next game that's unbelievably unexpected it's complete start over for mk8 this is Ed trying to prepare people for the drastic pivot in their plan as he spent a good few months talking up this grittier Gears of War style direction he had been teasing but much like many Mortal Kombat tournaments faint nothing can prepare you for this it wasn't until April of 2008 where a trailer emerged from the Phantom Zone giving Mortal Kombat players their first glimpse at the newest and surely most violent entry in the infamously blood-soaked franchise I remember my face in a constant shifting state of emotion while watching this trailer and the comments online ranged from oh I I don't know and are you serious and of course what's marvel yes Mortal Kombat was clashing with the brightly colored heroes and villains of the DC Universe why well why anything really cuz money anyway was always a slowly sinking ship and the seventh generation was particularly unkind to them while a fun but flawed shooter stranglehold was a monstrously expensive project for the company being their first big HD game running on Unreal 3 and it didn't really pay off not content with just losing that bunch of money Midway decided to lose way way more money with the failed development of this is Vegas the open-world Sin City simulator that wound up being canceled so Midway didn't just need a modest hit to save the company they needed a bonafide mega success and to do this they felt they needed to add an extra ingredient to the Mortal Kombat mix in an interview of Kaku Zeo which was published after the game's unveiling senior producer Henslow explained how this all came about and has always wanted to do a mash-up that was one of his dreams so somebody in her marketing department actually knew someone else in business development at DC and they kind of concocted this idea and brought it up it came and they presented and said hey we have the opportunity to license these characters how would you guys feel about putting them in the universe and everybody kind of jumped on it as it allows us to open up a new generation of kids as eyes to the Mortal Kombat franchise because kids right now have no idea any of these people are they don't know whose scorpion is and they haven't seen the Mortal Kombat movies I don't want to say it's dated but it definitely has its niche core audience that's not as mainstream as Batman and Superman hopefully these kids will be all like who's this yellow ninja in the back who's that guy what's his story and as they play it they'll be like oh yeah this guy's pretty cool so this will give us a lot of exposure what you just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard so yes - absolutely make sure that this Mortal Kombat game will give them lots of exposure action figures from out world and earth realm or smashed against figures from Gotham and metropolis maybe nowadays it doesn't seem so strange but you have to remember the state of DC at the time the latest Superman film was Superman Returns a bright cheery sequel to the Christopher Reeves continuity so DC didn't have nearly the dark edge would later a table which we seem to be thankfully reversing for the type of characters it just doesn't work with what was I supposed to do just let him die maybe so because of the ticking time bomb that was Midway the development for mk versus DC was incredibly aggressive being put together in only two years which is impressive as they jump from the ps2 straitened to Unreal 3 on next-gen Hardware in record time speaking of which Unreal 3 was always in the plan for mk8 even going back to that original pitch as Midway had licensed the expensive engine for many of their titles so the game was announced in April it revealed its full lineup of fighters in September and has released that November that's only eight months to get the word out and aside from all that it's pretty clear from just the amount of content or black thereof that the game had a hurried hectic development it's worse than suspected for example MK vs. DC was the first and only game post MK for that lacked any sort of crypt there was also no create a fighter conquest mo the tester might minigames or any additional modes found in the previous three titles in their place was the brand new story mode which had you go through both sides of the conflict rotating through each character well I mean except for you know katana destro Catwoman and Kano oh it also Baraka but Baraka never gets his chapter in any story mode so I guess that tradition started here while the game's story was a bit lackluster with 90% of all the fights being caused due to confusion about who was who and the rage force it was something new for fighting games assuring in a level of presentation that hadn't really been seen up to this point also three of the playable characters had no fatalities that being Shao Kahn darkside Archie's dark Khan shut up hell even the sloppily made rush palette swaps in the 2d games had some type of finisher speaking of the roster to make sure that the art styles mesh the darker look that Ed Boon ed hinted at was thrown aside and they just defaulted to the same sort of aesthetic they had for the ps2 trilogy just now in HD what's worse is that multiple costumes is something that MK adopted back in 1997 was another victim of the rush production schedule prior games offered vastly different looks for your sonya or your Raiden but in this you have better like those default designs cuz well you're stuck with them the DC Universe on the other hand well they looked like the DC Universe circa maybe 1989 which is a shame because you could have had those awesome redesigns from the 90s oh yeah that's the stuff regardless it's pretty clear that across the board almost every single aspect of previous Mortal Kombat games why they're pared back or simply cut aside from story mode arcade and multiplayer there was very little on offer except for the combo trials which is basically the fighting game equivalent of a time vampire where are you Superman oK we've been avoiding it long enough Superman unless being written by certain people doesn't viciously murder his enemies because he's supposed to be the best of all of us that's his appeal Batman also has a very strict no murder code to which he is supposed to abide by how all of the DC heroes in this game tend to want to preserve life and not take it so the idea that they'll be included in a Mortal Kombat game still seems like the ravings of a madman this concept should have broken down like right there DC didn't want to put out a product where their Man of Steel gets his spinal cord ripped out or have Wonder Woman disembowel an Australian mercenary because it's that's not a great look so the idea of Baraka killing anybody on the DC's was laughable at best to kinda get around this all DC villains and MK warriors came equipped with toned down fatalities where the DC good guys could only bring themselves to perform heroic brutalities these run the gamut from and finally it's just why did they even bother was the prospect of getting a few thousand more comic fans worth all this you have a character called death stroke his two weapons are guns and swords and he's barely allowed to use them in fact he and the Joker were so not allowed to do certain things that their original fatalities had to be altered even further to retain that oh so important teen rating like why did you even animate fatalities where people get shot in the head like what did you think was going to happen henslowe tried and failed miserably to justify this universally reviled decision they mandated that we had to do the team rating and it didn't take away from the over-the-top thing but that was something that I think needed to happen I mean this is something we've always defaulted to the alright rip his leg out and beat him with it or rip his heart out or just put blood on the screen but now we can't do that so what do we do now we've tried to make fatalities more bizarre and disturbing versus over-the-top gore and by doing that we've sharpened our gory ideas to the ideas that we had for Batman's original fatalities we're crazy awesome but we'll just put them in the bank and there's gonna be plenty of Mortal Kombat's in the future despite him trying best to sugarcoat it this was and will always be the reason why MK vs. DC is barely remembered at all the neutered violence toned down blood effects and these absolutely ridiculous slapstick finishing moves that failed to impress on just about every level body this coupled with the lack of violence and content the series was known for wound up posting the lowest scores of any mainline entry in the franchise although at least they weren't as dreadful as sane [Music] you know now despite all of this MK vs. DC still managed to sell like 1.5 million copies which while healthy wasn't much better than any of the ps2 titles the tactic of using DC characters to Lauren new or younger players couldn't really make up for the dearth of older disgruntled fans who opted not to partake in this epic struggle that was like 0 years in the making however there was one other aspect of the game that Edvin was key to improve on that being its roster through the magic of downloadable content I'd like to have DLC as soon as possible I think that might be a great Christmas gift to reinvigorate the game Boone would then go on to confirm they had been working on Korn she and Harley Quinn and would later heavily hint that Kung Lao and doomsday we're also in the cards but then Midway happened even with the sales of NK versus DC it just wasn't enough to save the company so the marketing stunt of Smashing two brands together and hoping for like doubled the sales completely failed it didn't pull Midway out of its death spiral and it prevented a promising traditional gory Mortal Kombat game from hitting store shelves in 2008 woods midway file from bankruptcy and Warner Brothers snapped everything up the DLC roadmap was quickly cancelled now normally this would be the part of the video where I tell you how this game was brimming with potential and how well it wasn't the most polished content rich package the core idea was sound but an MK versus DC's case no no it wasn't it's a great example of even though you can combine two things doesn't necessarily mean you should mortal kombat is its own beast and it works best by staying in that specific Lane and if anything the fact that MK vs. DC didn't really work out probably contributed to the creation of injustice which is probably what they should have done in the first place hey if you know of any other catastrophic clashes of fighting game failure arity did marvel infinite let me know in the comments below or punch through the walls with a flophouse VIP patreon to officially vote on our next topic see you next time and thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Matt McMuscles

Views: 951,144

Keywords: MK vs DC, MK vs DCU, Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe, Mortal Kombat, Video Game Disasters, Video Game Documentaries, Wha Happun, What Happened?, Matt McMuscles

Id: TrqXNdRUwXw

Length: 17min 1sec (1021 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 15 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/LammasuRex]

Let's not forget that this game made the Story Mode an industry standard.

[u/The_Draigg]

But guys! Remember how awesome Dark Kahn is?! ...Guys?

[u/Shrekt115]

WHEN'S MAHVEL

[u/Selenol]

I'm not well versed in marketing, can someone explain why the idea of a crossover in order to expose people to a new property is such a stupid idea, as Matt implies? I mean, obviously the execution has to be good, but is "kids like DC, they'll play this and get introduced to MK characters, and get into other MK games" a very unreasonable line of thought?

[u/Introspectre12]

Ooh, the game Marvel Vs. Capcom copied it's story mode from.

[u/ADGwasHERE]

Honestly I really liked this game

[u/not-so-radical]

They could do this again but have Wildstorm characters & the less clean cut DC characters.

Like Midnighter, Bronze Tiger & everyones favourite Grifter.

It'd make no money...