Ed Boon shares special behind-the-scenes video of Raiden breaking his hat during original Mortal Kombat filming for 30th anniversary
The problems also led to the creation of one of the thunder god's signature moves
It's kinda bizarre to think that the Mortal Kombat franchise is now 30 years old, but it can certainly feel that way when looking back at the original game now.
Series co-creator Ed Boon recently released his 3rd video celebrating MK's 30th anniversary, and this time he's sharing footage and fun stories of recording Raiden's motion capture for the first game where they ran into a lot of trouble with the lightning god's signature hat.
Showing actor Carlos Pesina in full costume on the recording set, everything appears to be going smoothly until they run into the issue of Raiden's straw hat falling whenever he moved his head too much.
That was especially the case when they attempted to capture the knockdown and wakeup animations, which led to the idea of Raiden simply teleporting back to a standing position and stuck as a feature of the character moving forward.
As amazing as Carlos is, there were some unexpected challenges that came up involving one of MK's most iconic costume pieces…. Raiden's hat. More specifically Raiden’s hat and the laws of physics.
— Ed Boon (@noobde) May 4, 2022
Disaster almost struck, however, with Pesina performing a front flip and landing directly on his hat, breaking it.
"This video also features a classic/tragic moment in MK history," wrote Boon on Twitter. "You can witness the unintentional destruction of Raiden’s hat that happened during our filming. Imagine how scared we were after the hat was smashed! Miraculously it was able to be repaired and we soldiered on!"
Eventually, we had to resort to a number of tricks to deal with that (damn🤣) hat constantly falling off. The first solution was to simply put the hat back on at the end of each take. Carlos would fall, hold his final pose, and @therealsaibot would fix the hat.
— Ed Boon (@noobde) May 4, 2022
It's very funny to see in action how unexpected problems during game development often leads to creative or innovative solutions with Boon also confirming they originally tried holding the hat in place with a single rubber band.
There is no confirmation currently as to whether Boon and NetherRealm Studios are planning any game content to coincide with Mortal Kombat's big anniversary, but it is still cool to get a glimpse at how a title that changed the industry came together.
We liked that solution (and effect) so much that we ended up giving Raiden a (now iconic) teleport move using the same animation. pic.twitter.com/uV3GvREyYx
— Ed Boon (@noobde) May 4, 2022
You can also find Boon's last anniversary video here, detailing how the palette swap ninjas were created even before they had names.
