Ed Boon, Creative Director of NetherRealm Studios and co-creator of the Mortal Kombat series, has shared what he imagined Spider-Man PS4 would have looked like if his studio had made the game.
No, it’s not a serious take on that concept. Instead, it’s a gif that has been edited to include some very Mortal Kombat elements in the base Spider-Man game for PS4. Specifically, it shows Spidey beating up his foes as usual, but this time we get to see the very real damage that such tremendous blows would cause via a Mortal Kombat-like x-ray camera system.
The footage is not only genuinely well edited, but it addresses an odd problem with Insomniac’s Spider-Man: the fact that Spider-Man arguably kills quite a few people during the course of his adventure. We see in this video that you can certainly make the argument that some of Spider-Man’s normal fights would result in the deaths of quite a few bad guys, but there are also instances in the game where Spider-Man does things like punch people off buildings. Some of those thugs are caught and trapped by a mysterious web, but others are allowed to float right to the ground. We’re also fairly sure that taking a rocket to the face is going to do some pretty extensive damage.
In any case, Insomniac seems to approve of this interpretation of their game. Their Twitter account replied to Ed Boon with the message “You’d be seeing some inner INNER Demons then!!”
So what is Ed Boon actually working on? Don’t ask us. The man has been teasing Mortal Kombat projects for quite some time now, but we’ve yet to see any definitive prove that anything is actually being done with the franchise. Of course, NetherRealm did make the amazing Injustice and Injustice 2 fighting games, so there is some precedent for them being allowed to work with superheroes.
All the same, we doubt that Marvel will let them take this approach with their characters.
Matthew Byrd is a staff writer for Den of Geek. He spends most of his days trying to pitch deep-dive analytical pieces about Killer Klowns From Outer Space to an increasingly perturbed series of editors. You can read more of his work here or find him on Twitter at @SilverTuna014.