he Mortal Kombat master takes back what he said to us about not developing Mortal Kombat for Wii, and explains how the game works with Nintendo's system. Plus get some interesting new information about the next-gen all new Mortal Kombat game and when we'll most likely be playing it.

Game Informer: In our last interview, we talked quite a bit about the Wii and the fact that Mortal Kombat wouldn’t work on the Wii. Surprisingly, that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore…(laughs)

Ed Boon: I think my theory is that my initial impression was that it was going to be a challenge. You know, I mentioned 15 years of associating special moves and fatalities with away-towards-A, away-towards-Y, away-towards-B, high block, low block–you know, all that stuff. And then you suddenly give a guy–the analogy I’d always say was, “Use a steering wheel to do a fighting game.” You know, can you do it? I think my initial reaction was, wow, that’s going to be really tough. And there were challenges, but, once we got a correlation between motions, the big thing we discovered was that you go up-down with the Wii remote and your guy drops into the ground to teleport while you’re doing that downward motion. That really feels good. As you’re going down, your guy’s going down. If you go away and then towards, Scorpion throws his spear in the direction that you swing your Wii remote. Once we got that connection, we realized, “OK, this is the way to go,” and the other stuff just kind of fell into place. So yeah, I never said that. (laughs)

GI: Good answer. (laughs) Is this your team that’s working on it?

Boon: Our team’s main focus right now is the next-gen game that we’re doing. The game is being developed in California–a company called JGI–they’re a really great group of guys. The producer is Shaun Himmerick, who was the producer for Shaolin Monks, and Shaun and I every once in a while will go back to check the game out in L.A. and give our comments, feedback and whatnot. We have a really good relationship with them, in terms of they understand what Mortal Kombat is.

GI: How much input have you had on it?

Boon: Quite a bit. We toyed with what is an appropriate number of motions that we want to ask the player to do to perform a special move. Obviously, we’re not going to ask the player to draw the alphabet and then you throw Scorpion’s spear, because it’s way too long of a sequence. So, we realized that simple two-directional motions–away-towards, up-down or a modified circular motion for the guys who do backflips and stuff—those were the things that felt the best, and that was really our criteria; what felt good when you do the move and you see the character do it, how long it takes before you do the move before you see the action. That was the criterion. Anything that felt like, “OK, draw the letter Z and then the guy does a different motion,” we just eliminated that. It was based on what felt right.

GI: We’ve obviously seen the video and watched how everything works–

Boon: The dork video (laughs)

GI: How intuitive is it? We’ve seen a lot of games that have come through since the Wii’s launch that, on paper, sound like they would work really well, but in actual reality don’t work very well. Has it been challenging?

Boon: We started following some of those games, thinking, “OK, everyone’s doing it this way, so that should be the way to do it,” but we realized that the complex motions were just too much to ask of a player in the heat of a battle, you know all those crazy things. So, what we found, was that the simpler we got with the motions, the more intuitive it felt and the more people said, “OK, now I get it.” We used to have it so you’d hold the trigger button and you had to let go at the same time that you’d do it, and once you tell somebody that, they’d do it and they wouldn’t let go. Then you’d say, “You have to let go now,” and they wouldn’t do it or they’d let go too early. We decided to remove all of those requirements and let simple motions be the main thing that’s required of the player. That was a challenge, just narrowing it down, trying the complex stuff and saying, “Why doesn’t this feel good?” And then saying there are real simple motions and that is what’s working. That was the big challenge. It wasn’t a technical challenge, it was more of a gameplay/feel challenge.

GI: Why isn’t it playable here?

Boon: The main reason is that for the really good players, right now you can fire off Scorpion’s spear and you can do his hellfire. And there’s this little window of when you want to combine the moves together, pop a guy up in the air and then do his backflip kick before he lands on the ground. That’s stuff we’re in the process of tightening right now–because we definitely don’t want to have anybody play it, let alone release the game before all that stuff is tightened up–and that’s our main focus right now. The stuff works, but it’s not as tight as we really want it to be.

GI: Are all the modes that are in the versions that are already out going to be included in the Wii version?

Boon: Yeah, we have all of the Konquest mode and all of the Motor Kombat and the Kreate a Fighter–all that stuff is contained in the game. We added the endurance mode and we added the Chameleon character from way back in the N64 days because everybody bitched and moaned about it. (laughs)We had the advantage of releasing the first game, seeing what people wanted more of and adding that into the game.

GI: Are you supporting online at all?

Boon: I wish. Right now, there’s not an infrastructure that’s set up for us to go online with the lobbies and all that. I’m hoping future Wii games will have that stuff set up and we’ll be ready to do that.