Revealed: Awesome Mortal Kombat re-imagining artwork
Can’t take credit for uncovering this one – that goes to Kotaku’s original newspiece. Ex-Midway staffer Vincent Proce has posted an awesome entry on his personal blog revealing some re-imagined character art for a Mortal Kombat reboot – while they’re all awesome, I thought the Scorpion pic above would do for a great preview of his artwork.
I know I tend to keep discussion on here about old video games and this maybe straddles that line, but back in the day I loved Mortal Kombat. Mind, these days I only boot them up for nostalgia or to have a laugh (unlike SF2, which has aged extremely well!), but still, MK was a big part of the gaming scene in the early-mid 90s.
The disappointing thing is that the fresh direction from the above shows that there was obviously plenty of talent sitting at Midway, despite the company’s lackluster performance over the last decade. Personally, I found Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks to be an amazing watershed moment for the series as Midway did the impossible and re-imagined the series, tipped the hat numerous times to old-school fans like your truly and changed the game into a coop brawler that not only looked really nice, but played extremely well. The game was just so much fun!
And so as I sit here and trawl through Vincent’s post and admire that truly awesome artwork, it leaves me thinking – if they gave the series a reboot, combined with this really cool art direction and moved it into a coop fighter, action-adventure or something else entirely, it could have been a great current-gen entry in the franchise. Would make for another great tribute to the series for old farts like yours truly, and would bring another local, arcade-style coop game to the incredible lack thereof in gaming over the last two generations. But that’s a topic for another post (or series of posts!) entirely 😀
In the meantime, check out the Vincent Proce art blog.
