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Ed Boon has most famously spent the better part of the last 25 years working on the Mortal Kombat series. He was the original lead programmer on the game back in 1992 and, as part of a tiny four-person team at Midway Games (alongside series co-creator John Tobias), shaped the first Western fighting game series to give dominant Japanese fighters like Street Fighter and King of Fighters a run for their money.

Now, as creative director of Chicago-based NetherRealm Studios which was formed in 2010, Boon has successfully steered the MK franchise through the difficult transitional period that saw most fighting games fade in relevance in the early to mid-2000s. Not only is Mortal Kombat enjoying its greatest period of commercial success – 2015's Mortal Kombat X was the fastest selling game in the series, and has since gone on to sell over 5 million copies worldwide – but NetherRealm has applied its expertise to the DC comics universe, resulting in the popular Injustice fighting game and comic books. 2013's Injustice: Gods Among Us was incredibly well-received both critically and commercially, matching the performance of Boon's most recent Mortal Kombat.

As the bigger, bolder and more ambitious Injustice 2 launches on May 16 for PS4, Xbox One and Steam, we spoke with Boon to look back on his early days making the first Mortal Kombat and what it was like reinventing his iconic game as a superhero brawler. He also shares his views on esports and the resurgence of fighting games, the expansion of games into comic books, whether he's played the latest Zelda, and why the concept of the Wonder Twins in Injustice 2 would be (in theory) the greatest idea ever.

Pretty good interview. A quote:

It's your 25th year making fighting games, starting with the original Mortal Kombat. Looking back at this huge body of work, how has your approach to development changed?

It's a night and day difference from the first game until now. The first game had four people on the team, and now we have about 200. We were making that game for arcades, it was completely different hardware. The games were designed to take a quarter every X-minutes or something, so you made gameplay and design decisions to accommodate that. You just had an entirely different set of requirements, parameters and limitations. And then, it's not like it switched overnight to the games we make today, but as time went along the games got bigger and bigger. They were still coin-operated games but they were bigger, and then around Mortal Kombat 5 we stopped making the coin-op version and went directly to home.

On the first game, I was the only programmer on the team, and I was coming up with the moves. And over the years, I just did less and less programming and more of the big-picture stuff and influencing the various aspects of the game. My position really became more of...it's like you're steering the Titanic rather than writing individual lines of code.

So then, as we went into the 360 and PlayStation 3 and all that, it became more of a production like a movie. All of a sudden, we have actors, and we have cinematics. That's around around the time we started doing our big, elaborate story modes which, from a production standpoint, is like a movie. We have sets, camera men, animators, special effects, audio, musical scores, it's literally like making a 2-hour movie, except we're splicing in these interactive moments, the fighting parts. That, in itself, is like a two year project.

But then, on top of that, we're doing all of the things that are signature to Mortal Kombat. The more and more elaborate Fatalities, the Krypt, the secrets, all that stuff. Over the years, it became so much more of a production, kinda keeping up with where video games have gone from 25 years ago.