New Mortal Kombat 11 Klassic Skins pay homage to 1995 movie

The new Mortal Kombat 11 Klassic Skin pack features character models for Johnny Cage, Sonya Blade, and Raiden based on the actors in the 1995 Mortal Kombat film.

The 1995 Mortal Kombat film is well known among B-movie circles for featuring a bizarre and creative take on the game’s very loose story. The movie itself is iconic both for having a very campy tone, and featuring Christopher Lambert (Highlander) as Raiden.

Mortal Kombat and its odd relationship with movies

Mortal Kombat has already incorporated a number of specific genre characters into its games through the use of interesting and creative crossovers. These include the likes of the Terminator, Freddy Kruger, Jason Vorhees, the Xenomorph, the Predator, John Rambo, RoboCop, Leatherface, and so many more, all pulled from slasher films, ‘80s macho action films, and monster movies.

It’s hard to imagine why it took Mortal Kombat so long to finally pay homage to its own movie. This skin pack brings in Christopher Lambert’s Raiden, Linden Ashby’s Johnny Cage, and Bridgette Wilson-Sampras’ Sonya Blade to the game, both in likeness and through their voice acting.

For fans who haven’t yet seen the movie, the 1995 Mortal Kombat movie includes such campy fights as the one between Johnny Cage and Scorpion. It features some mid-90s CGI and fight choreography that makes it feel like someone overfunded two weird friends’ college film class project and ended up with something absolutely bizarre.

What led to the Mortal Kombat film being so campy?

For most of the ‘90s and ‘00s, video game movies were simply made campy. This wasn’t (always) the result of people not caring or not trying, it was usually more because writing for a game and writing for a movie require different skills.

The original Mortal Kombat game’s story was summarized in a paragraph during the first game, and served as little more than window dressing to explain why seven random people, some of whom seem to have magical powers, were fighting in the same tournament.

What the games lacked in plot it made up for in lore, establishing the various realms and their inhabitants.

This dynamic is common to many games, and makes adapting them into movies especially difficult as the threadbare plot offers little guidance to writers, while the rich lore creates many pitfalls which, if handled poorly, can irk fans.

This is why movie adaptations of games frequently struggled to captivate audiences and achieve critical acclaim. Oftentimes, the best fans kould hope for was that the movie adaptations were at least fun, which Mortal Kombat most certainly was.