Let’s deal with this, first and foremost: They announced a new Mortal Kombat game today, and for reasons that we could get into a lot easier this evening, were we not suddenly afflicted with a pounding headache drilling straight through our brains, WB Games and NetherRealm Studios have opted to call this new video game—the 12th (ish) title in this long-running series—Mortal Kombat 1.
Yeah, there’s the headache. God, it’s right behind our eye…
See, they couldn’t do the usual “back to basics” naming convention with this one and just call it Mortal Kombat—an irritating, but basically accepted move at this point—because they already did that, back in 2011, for the ninth game in the series. (Were we ever so young?) So instead, they’re marking that this game is apparently supposed to be a reset to the franchise’s shockingly convoluted chronology—courtesy of the time-smooshing ending of Mortal Kombat 11—by declaring that it’s Mortal Kombat 1. Which, to be fair, is a title the series has never used before, because you don’t refer to things as “So and So 1" when you’ve only got… one of them.
So that’s fine.
Anyway the other thing about this trailer is that it’s clearly determined to be a real Mortal Kombat-ass trailer; new god of reality Liu Kang might talk a whole lot about peace and friendship and tranquility here, but things swiftly devolve into the real, gory shit once the mortal kombating starts breaking out. Heads explode, throats get cut, a guy gets, like, unzipped: Even without any gameplay footage, NetherRealm clearly wants us to know that the bodycount will be up to series standards on *sigh* Mortal Kombat 1 when it hits consoles on September 19.