Ed Boon lists the 6 essential characters who are included in all Mortal Kombat games
Spoilers, Scorpion and Sub-Zero are two of them
In this day and age of DLC, you never really know what to expect when it comes to fighting game rosters. We've heard Capcom say Ryu and Chun-Li will be in every Street Fighter game, but recently got a somewhat similar statement from Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon.
During a recent interview with IGN as we draw nearer to the release date of Mortal Kombat 1, Boon noted that there are six characters that he and his team include in every Mortal Kombat entry.
Noting that there are a handful of 3D era characters making their first returns in a long while to the franchise in MK1, IGN asked Boon about the process for populating rosters.
"For people who've been with us, if you count, we're somewhere around 90 to 100 characters that we've introduced in some capacity over the years," he starts, "and we always have Scorpion, Sub Zero, Liu Kang, Raiden, Kitana, Mileena. And so we always want some characters to have a break, so everybody can get excited about the other characters."
While we would never quite put it past Boon to throw a future curve ball and change this approach, it is interesting that he and his team see these six as the core, non-negotiable fighters.
Of course, we've seen this doesn't exactly mean that all six will be on the base playable roster, as Mileena (in)famously was held as DLC in Mortal Kombat 11 until the game's final batch of newcomers was added in at the tail end of 2020.
All six have already been revealed as base characters for Mortal Kombat 1, so there's no worry there, but as Boon said in the same interview, the franchise's ravenous fans will always find another absent character to demand.
Whom will you be spamming social media with demands for (but really, please don't) once we get the initial MK1 roster? Which of the six essential Mortal Kombatants are you most interested in now that NetherRealm Studios is changing up stories and basic character identities?
Chime in with your thoughts and answers in the comments as we wait with baited breath for Mortal Kombat 1 to drop later this month.
Mortal Kombat 1 is scheduled to launch for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC (Steam and Epic Games Store) on Sept. 19, 2023.
