Wii fans are about to be treated to the Wii-created Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, which releases later this month. AMN had the chance to talk to the game’s producer, Shaun Himmerick, about the upcoming Wii fighter. Below, you’ll find our interview with him, where he goes into detail as to why Activision decided to re-create Armageddon on Wii rather than create a totally new Mortal Kombat game, why the game doesn’t have online play and much more.

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AMN: How many modes are in the game, and what are they?

Shaun Himmerick: Even within Kombat we have multiple modes to try.

Wii- Remote Training: This will let you choose any character and practice as that character. While practicing you learn the completely new gesture system for the super moves of that particular character.
Arcade: You can fight your way up the Ladder against the game to defeat the final boss.
Endurance Mode: This lets you chose any fighter and challenge yourself with one health bar against a continuous barrage of enemies. Your health bar will not replenish, but after every few opponents you’ll get Health Upgrades.
Versus: You can take on your friends in Head to Head battles with any character of your choosing.
Practice: This lets you do any move or combo against an enemy who does not fight back to hone your abilities.

Kreate-a-Fighter: This mode lets you design and build your very own fighter. You control everything from the look of the hair, color of the eyes to the character’s name. You also have the ability to decide which super moves the character has, you control it all.

Konquest: This is a full single player adventure game with everything you’d expect it to have including an in-depth story, evolving powers and a unique kombat system as you progress through various realms of the Mortal Kombat Universe.

Motor Kombat: This is a Mortal Kombat themed Kart racing game. Complete with super moves and death traps. Motor Kombat is a ton a fun by your self or with up to 4 players. The Wii’s controls make this feel even better than the original.

It is like having 3 full games in one.

AMN: Why remake Armageddon for Wii instead of creating a totally new Mortal Kombat from the ground up?

Shaun Himmerick: We wanted to focus on the controls for the Wii being the biggest new feature for MK on the Wii. This version was not treated like a port. The controls were rebuilt and redesigned for the Wii-Remote from the ground up for every mode in the game. It is a completely new experience.

Also, Mortal Kombat Armageddon is such a complete Mortal Kombat experience that we wanted to bring it to the Wii system. It has every MK Character from history including your own from the Kreate-a-Fighter Mode. Mortal Kombat: Armageddon also has the full single player adventure mode in Konquest, as well as Motor Kombat.

The Wii version has additional kontent with the new Endurance mode and a new Character, Khameleon.

AMN: What kinds of options does the Kreate-a-Fighter feature allow? Can you go into detail and explain the process of creating your own fighter and what advantages and disadvantages there are to making your own fighter?

Shaun Himmerick: Kreate-a-Fighter is very in-depth, I could never go into all of the options here, but I’ll definitely hit some of the general topics.

You can control everything about how the character looks. Just a few examples of what you can control include, boots, belts, shirts, all clothing, eye size, nose dimensions and everything in the face. The look does not impact the way a character plays.

For Gameplay you can build a Create-a-fighter to suit how you like to play. For example, you can choose a small female body type and she will be quick and faster than most of the other characters, but her attacks will not cause quite as much damage. On the opposite side you could choose a large male body type and his attacks will do more damage but they take longer to do so you are vulnerable to quicker attacks. After that you can choose the fighting style of your character and if you want you can choose the specific attacks that your character has for hand to hand fighting, as well as your weapon of choice. Of course, we have some basic defaults that you can choose if you do not want to get into that much detail.

Finally you can choose from a wide assortment of super moves to suit how you like to fight. Pick a teleport or throw a spear, it’s up to you. I like to get the Tombstone Drop move for any created character because it sets your opponent up for multi hit combos.

All of these variations can have huge impact on how your character plays.


AMN: There is said to be an extra character included in the Wii version of the game (that wasn’t in the Xbox and PS2 versions). Which character is that?

Shaun Himmerick: The female Character, Khameleon, is exclusive to the Wii. She has not been seen since the old days on the N64 version of MK Trilogy.

AMN: What is Kreate a Fatality and how does it work?

Shaun Himmerick: Kreate-a-Fatality is a system where you can basically build your own bigger fatality. There are combos or gestures that will allow you to pull of “mini-fatalities” and then string them together however you like. There are tons of mini-fatalities you can string together in endless ways.

The Kreate-a-Fatalities in the Wii version are also all done with our gesture system using the Wii Remote. The gestures are closely related to what your character is doing on the screen. For example if you are going to rip your opponent’s torso off at the waist, you would need to reach forward with both hands and pull their torso up. So the motion in the game is a simple gesture of “poking” BOTH the Wii-Remote and Nunchuk forwards towards the screen and then lifting the Wii Remote and Nunchuk up in one motion, a “Poke then Up” motion with both controllers.

AMN: Can you explain the control scheme? How does it all work – with the Wii-mote and all?

Shaun Himmerick: Every super move in the game is done with a gesture you do with the Wii-Remote. We also wanted the motions to help you feel more connected to the game. For example to do a move like Sektor’s Teleport Punch move you simply move the Wii-Remote UP and then DOWN to send Sektor down into the ground and he will disappear into the ground and then come up by your opponent and send him up with his punch. For the rest of the controls, we basically tried to put all of the attacks on the Wii-Remote and all of the movement and defensive moves on the Nunchuk. The Wii-Remote does all the super moves with our simple gesture system. The throw button is the A button and the attack buttons are done with the D-pad. We are pretty sure you’ll be amazed how intuitive this system becomes.

Additionally, we wanted to give the player as many options as possible so you can also play any mode of the game with the Wii’s classic controller or a GameCube controller.

AMN: What kinds of multiplayer modes are there?

Shaun Himmerick: Kombat is of course playable as single player or against your friends in a 2 player versus mode.

Motor Kombat is playable with up to 4 people as well as a single player game.

AMN: Why no online play?

Obviously we had online on other platforms so it wasn’t going to be a technology challenge for us, but Nintendo didn’t have their online system ready for us when we would have needed to implement it. That is a big reason we focused on giving the single player experience even more attention to perfect the new Controls system, the addition of Endurance mode and an additional Kharacter.


AMN: Does the game use the speaker on the Wii remote?

Shaun Himmerick: Yes we do. We wanted to use the Wii-remote speaker to help with the gameplay. Anytime you do a gesture for a super move you will hear a sound effect come from the Wii-remote speaker that will happen as the super move is happening on the screen. A confirmation you hit the move. This same system functions for the create-a-fatalities.

AMN: Since this is kind of a re-release and not a wholly new game, what will it be priced at?

Shaun Himmerick: Mortal Kombat: Armageddon for the Wii will be available for $49.95 MSRP