Mutant League Football creator Kickstarts Mutant Football League

The freaks are back in town: the creator of Mutant League Football for the Sega Genesis is hosting a Kickstarter for Mutant Football League. The spiritual successor will bring the monsters-and-mayhem gridiron game to Xbox Live and tablets 20 years after the original game hit store shelves.

Though Mutant League Football spawned a hockey spinoff and even a cartoon, the Electronic Arts franchise stopped dead in its tracks just a few years later. It got so bad that fans approached Mendheim, asking if they could use his name for a reboot project--he decided to do it the other way around, he told us, and enlisted some for his new development effort.

MFL will be just as ready to pick up and play as the old version; while it might share subject matter with tabletop-turned-video-game Blood Bowl, the similarities end there. It will bear some intentional similarities to the NFL, by way of satirizing players (RG3, meet BFD3) and its crackdown on illegal hits.

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"It's the league that makes all their money because it's a gladiator violence sport, but they hide all the concussion stuff and they go, 'Oh, you can't hit here, you can't hit here, if you do, you get penalized,'" he said. "In Mutant League it's the opposite: you get penalized if you're not killing guys."

So why not just call it Mutant League Football? Though EA abandoned the trademark years ago, Mendheim said, he wanted the name to reflect that this is an entirely new project built in the spirit of its predecessor. Plus, "it's the MF league!"

"The MF League" is asking for $750,000 to begin production. A pledge of $15 will secure you the scaled-down mobile version, and $30 down will get you the Xbox Live version. And a special backers-only fart animation.