Mortal Kombat 11 ‘so brutal its developers were diagnosed with PTSD’ – after being ‘forced’ to watch clips of hangings and cow slaughters
THE latest Mortal Kombat game is the most brutal and realistic in the series so far – and that reportedly took its toll on the developers who spent hours creating it.
Spending months on end creating photo-realistic animations of breaking spines, spilling guts and spraying blood left at least on with post-traumatic stress disorder, according to a report from gaming blog Kotaku.
“You’d walk around the office and one guy would be watching hangings on YouTube, another guy would be looking at pictures of murder victims, someone else would be watching a video of a cow being slaughtered,” one un-named developer told the site.
Detailed examination of reference material is a key part of making movies and video games, and has become even more important as gamers get better gear that is capable of showing things in more and more detail.
Details in the game include x-ray vision as bones are broken from particularly hard hits, or bloody spraying from wounds and reacting differently as hits different surfaces – dribbling down stone, being absorbed by dirt or freezing, for instance.
This is also the eleventh Mortal Kombat game, and there is pressure from the audience for each one to be bigger and bloodier than the last.
The game is known for its ‘Fatalities’, finishing moves where characters kill each other in ever-more-ridiculous and gory ways.
Mortal Kombat 11’s fatalities include one where you decapitate your opponent, freeze their head then smash it into tiny pieces.
Another sees one character literally rip another’s face off, while in a third you punch through the other fighter’s torso, grab their spine, and rip it out through their body — bringing their head with it, before then mounting that head on a spike.
This means bosses were “making sure you can feel the pop when the spine is ripped out from the rest of the body,” the developer said.
Doing this requires watching that gory reference material repeatedly do both get the desired effect and still be anatomically correct.
Another developer reportedly said that as a result of working on the game when he looks at his dog he now “just sees the guts inside of it.”
“He couldn’t look at his dog without imagining all of the viscera,” according to the report.
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The report comes after another developer claimed that developing the 2011 iteration of the game “nearly killed” him, with other alleging 100-hour working weeks were not mandated, but were normal.
Sun Online has contacted the game’s publishers for comment.
The latest version of the game stars MMA-turned-WWE star Ronda Rousey, and looks to have a slew of violent movie characters on the way too.
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