Turns out Jean-Claude Van Damme passed on Mortal Kombat more than once
Oh, what could have been...
There’s plenty of lore about the Mortal Kombat universe and the games in general, and one of the bigger pieces concerns Jean-Claude Van Damme. As plenty of people know, the original plan for Mortal Kombat was to have a game that was fronted by Jean-Claude Van Damme. That obviously never came to be, and the Mortal Kombat franchise was born without his involvement.
In a new interview with Polygon, Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon reveals that Jean-Claude Van Damme has actually turned down a Mortal Kombat collaboration more than once. There was the original pitch at the franchise’s inception, and one that came much more recently.
I wonder that myself too. We’ve been pretty vocal with our story of wanting it to be a Van Damme game, and we actually made a presentation — like, a video [to show Van Damme]. I found it in my basement a few months ago. It’s an actual tape — I’m gonna probably release it online somewhere — but it’s our pitch to Van Damme. We took images of Bloodsport and talked about digitized graphics and how it’s going to be [Van Damme] in the game. At some point he passed. But we later inquired, maybe a couple of times, as recently as, like, [Mortal Kombat 9], if he wanted to be in a skin of the game. For some reason, it just never came through. But yeah, I wonder if he even knows that he was supposed to be the Mortal Kombat guy. He was supposed to be Johnny Cage.
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