Mortal Kombat boss wants to borrow The Last of Us' naming convention

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The Last of Us Part 1 could be a trendsetter

Mortal Kombat 1
(Image credit: Warner Bros.)

Mortal Kombat 1 marks another reboot for the venerable fighting series, and that means that in a few years' time, developer NetherRealm will once again have to figure out what to name the next sequel. Series boss Ed Boon says that The Last of Us could serve as an inspiration.

"If we did another game in this lineage of Mortal Kombat games, I think I'd want to call it Mortal Kombat 2," Boon tells GamesRadar+. "We could do Part 1, or Part 2 like The Last of Us does. We certainly won't call it Mortal Kombat 13." The Last of Us and Mortal Kombat already have a surprisingly close tie, thanks to the HBO series.

The last MK reboot released in 2011, and was simply called Mortal Kombat. Since that's nightmarishly confusing these days, most fans have taken to calling it MK9, and its own sequels were appropriately referred to as X and 11. Numbers that high can scare off new players, and while Boon says MK1 wasn't making any special efforts to be a jumping-on point, he's coming to recognize that the name might help there - as will the rebooted continuity.

"There's a big number 1 in the title. If a player was looking at MK11 and thinking to themselves: ‘I've missed the first 10, I can't jump into this one,’ then yeah, maybe this one is a better game to on-board new players. The fact is we are telling a new story, literally from the big bang of this universe, it's a new story that we're creating."

Dustin Bailey
Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.