Netherrealm Studios' Narrative Director Answers All of Our Mortal Kombat 1 Lore Questions

23.08.2023 - 07:17 / ign.com / Ed Boon

At Gamescom 2023, we were able to sit down with Netherrealm Studios' story and voiceover director Dominic Cianciolo. During our interview, we asked Cianciolo a ton of questions about Mortal Kombat 1, specifically the lore side of things.

As previously confirmed by the developer, the upcoming installment in this popular fighting game franchise serves as a soft reboot for the series.

Read on for our full Gamescom interview with NetherRealm Studios' Dominic Cianciolo below, then check out our final preview and our separate conversation with director Ed Boon.

IGN: So I guess the first thing that I wanted to talk about was, was it always in the cards and the plan to do this grand reset of the timeline as far back as Mortal Kombat 11 and then Aftermath? Because I remember I watched the ending of Aftermath and I actually took it as, oh, we're going back to the era of Great Kung Lao and we're going to tell that story. Was it always in the cards for this?

Dominic Cianciolo, Story and Voiceover Director: I think when Ed chose the direction for Mortal Kombat 11's story with the various pitches that we gave him, and we sort of ended up with this chronica and the time reset, I think we all knew at that point there was going to be a reboot in the cards. The exact nature of that reboot was not determined at that time. That was kind of later. As we went into Aftermath and we came out that, Ed's and I had ideas like, you know what? We've been doing this same story or same vein of stories for the last 30 years. We're just in this anniversary. We've got this chance to start fresh, let's see what we can do and how to change it. And from there it became a discussion of what kind of a reboot did he want?

And so there was this discussion of, okay, is it a really crazy reboot? Is it the Kelvin timeline reboot, where it's like, it's kind of a reboot, but it's not? And finding that level of just how much we wanted to change and how different we wanted to make it. And then as we developed the story for this, it was the process of teasing that out and figuring out what stories we wanted to play with and then what stories needed to stay more close to what we know as we went through it.

As someone who's been part of creating Mortal Kombat's story for so long, can you talk a little bit about what it's been like to almost have this blank canvas to paint on and create this new timeline for Mortal Kombat?

DC: It was a lot of fun to work on this and to reboot it in this way because it allowed us to do a lot of the things that we kind of wanted to do in the past, but really couldn't squeeze in and make sense with what we were handed, with what the narrative had grown. There were ideas from the very early days of Mortal Kombat that were