The Mortals Behind Kombat : Creators Bask in Success as Arcade Hit Takes On a Life of Its Own

Considering that they’ve made a career of bone-crushing punches, head-snapping kicks and flesh-rending death rays, Ed Boon and John Tobias are a couple of remarkably unassuming fellows.

The twentysomething co-creators of the wildly successful Mortal Kombat video games do not brandish menacing metal claws, do not sprout deadly tentacles and do not teleport across their hotel room. But they do speak with quiet pride of their latest creation, a home cartridge version of their third Mortal Kombat arcade game, which was released Friday the 13th, appropriately enough. In Mortal Kombat 3, claws, tentacles and teleportation are put to very active use.

“It’s a fast, fun game,” says Boon with a smile and a shrug. “And it’s developed a very strong story line. Players are hooked on the continuing saga of Mortal Kombat, and frankly, so are we.”

The saga began in 1992 when computer programmer Boon and graphic artist Tobias found themselves working together in the Chicago office of the WMS game company. When the pair decided to develop their own work together, the result was Mortal Kombat. The video game was one of the first based on scenarios of hand-to-hand combat, now a common format. And it was one of the first to take advantage of the digitization process through which film of costumed actors could be integrated into the game’s animation.

Combining their love of Bruce Lee movies, monster movies and super-heroes, Boon and Tobias worked with some loose appropriations of Asian legends to fashion a game that presented a mythic, painstakingly detailed alternative universe. Tobias created the strong characters, sci-fi costumes, brutal weapons and elaborate story lines, while Boon brought it all together in an almost infinitely layered design. Even after hundreds of plays, players would find secret levels of competition, hidden strategies and surprise characters.

Soon after the first quarters were dropped into Mortal Kombat, it became the most-played game in the country’s arcades.

“Arcades are the ultimate test,” Tobias says. “There’s no advertising and no hype. New games just suddenly turn up, and they’re all in crappy black cabinets. Only the strength of the game gets kids to play them. The first weekend we tested Mortal Kombat in an arcade, we saw kids spend all day Saturday playing the game, and then they came back and spent all day Sunday playing the game. They could have been hanging out with their friends, but they chose to hang out in our Mortal Kombat world. That’s when we knew we were on to something.”

That “something” sold millions of copies when it was introduced in home-game form, and the same success was duplicated in arcades and homes when Boon and Tobias developed Mortal Kombat 2. The third installment is expected to do the best business of all. But the sales figures have not inflated the creators’ egos.

“A lot of times I think we’re looking at this game the way other players do,” Boon says. “It’s not, ‘Look at us,’ but, ‘Wow, look at that game--that’s pretty cool.’ We’re as amazed by Mortal Kombat as anybody else.”

Boon and Tobias’ world of good-versus-evil themes and super-being punch-outs has proved to have an amazing life beyond game screens. New Line Cinema’s “Mortal Kombat” feature was a top draw at theaters this summer (having grossed more than $67 million at the box office), and more Kombat thrills can be had by way of action figures, animated videos, comic books and novelizations.

An elaborately staged “Mortal Kombat” live tour is also allowing fans to watch their favorite Kombatants duel in the flesh. The tour makes Southern California stops Saturday at the Pond of Anaheim and Sunday at the Forum.

The creators have had enough input in the development of each of their game’s offshoots to keep characters and story lines consistent, but most of their time over the last year has been spent on Mortal Kombat 3.

“We’d love to be more involved in every project that comes along,” Tobias says. “But working on each new version of the game is our top priority. We’re always a little nervous that someone’s going to put their own twist on Mortal Kombat in some other format, but whenever we meet with people we just hammer home that you have to stay true to the game or it loses its appeal to fans.”

Two years ago, Boon and Tobias discovered that their game had few fans in Congress, when Mortal Kombat was frequently cited during Senate hearings as gratuitously violent entertainment that was not appropriate for children.

“It was a little awkward to hear that going on, and it was pretty clear that the senators were not really game players,” Tobias says with a chuckle. “They’d just been told, ‘This is something very bad.’ ”

Adds Boon: “We didn’t mind the idea of voluntary labels on video games, and as soon as the industry did that, the whole controversy disappeared. But the point of our game has never been scenes of violence. It’s the characters and the stories that keep people coming back. Look, the movie was completely true to the game, and it was rated PG-13.”

Boon does acknowledge that Mortal Kombat can exert some surprising influence over its young players, however.

“I was at an arcade,” he explains, “and a kid came up to me and said he really liked the game. I said, ‘That’s great.’ He said, ‘No--I really like the game.’ He tilted his head down and I saw that he had the game’s dragon logo shaved into his hair. Those are the moments that are kind of strange for us. We thought we had a good game when we started out, but we never imagined we’d see Mortal Kombat, the Haircut.”

* “Mortal Kombat--The Live Tour,” the Pond, 2695 E. Katella Ave., Anaheim, Saturday , 7:30 p.m.; the Forum, 3900 W. Manchester Ave., Inglewood, Sunday, 1 and 5 p.m. $9.50-$17.50. (213) 480-3232, (714) 740-2000, (805) 583-8700.