James completes his look at the Mortal Kombat franchise, with a look at how its legacy is continuing.<\/em><\/p>\n

As I discussed in Part 1<\/a>, trends in entertainment (like everything else) are cyclical. In\u00a0Part 2<\/a>,\u00a0I talked about how Mortal Kombat had its heyday and while not disappearing, became significantly less relevant and appreciated than it used to be. In this, my third and final part, I will combine those two ideas and explain that Mortal Kombat flew under the radar for a while but is now primed to come back. In fact, it has already started.<\/p>\n

Mortal Kombat games didn\u2019t stopped being made after its golden age, they just ceased to be culturally relevant. Serious gamers were aware of the subsequent releases, but to the average person, the titles between and including 1998\u2019s Mortal Kombat 4 and 2007\u2019s Mortal Kombat: Armageddon were largely unknown. And for most people who\u00a0did\u00a0<\/em>know about them saw them as mere cash grabs, attempts to milk every last dollar from a burnt-out franchise. But the franchise still held a spot in the heart of many gamers who would be happy to get behind it again if only it could provide something interesting for the modern gamer.<\/p>\n

This started to happen in 2008 with Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, in which the worlds of Mortal Kombat and DC Comics collide and the characters that populate them can fight each other. It was mostly a typical Mortal Kombat game, with a few new features, but instead of using just MK characters, you could be Superman, Batman, The Joker and several other characters from the comics giant DC. While the video game\/comic book crowd certainly has a lot of overlap, this was around the time when comic books were becoming mainstream. Since Mortal Kombat\u2019s golden age finished, there had been a huge boom in the popularity of superheroes and it only made sense to capitalize on this. In fact, the timing couldn\u2019t have been much better as the game came out just a few months after the release of The Dark Knight. That film was one of the biggest comic book movies of all time, one of the biggest films of the year and appealed not just to die hard film buffs and comic book fans, but judging by the box office receipts, almost everybody. The movie reminded everyone how badass Batman and The Joker could be, and this game allowed you to be both of them, a factor definitely contributing to its success. As an indication of how much the concept of the game interested people, MK vs DC became the most pre-ordered game in the history of the franchise, a great sign that this idea was used at the right time in popular culture. But it wasn\u2019t just the notion of the game but the game itself, because when gamers got their hands on it, few seem disappointed. While the release of the game was no Mortal Monday, critics and gamers were definitely enthusiastic about it. The story was a bit far-fetched, sure, but most agreed it was executed shockingly well and the gameplay was reviewed positively. As a testament to its playability, the Xbox 360 version became the 6th\u00a0<\/span>most rented game of 2009. I would guess that a lot of this success had to do with the timing of the superhero craze and the incredible popularity of The Dark Knight but, to its credit, Mortal Kombat had capitalized on this well, and as a result, the franchise was starting to regain momentum.<\/p>\n

A major part of the superhero movie craze of that time was the concept of the reboot and just as the game utilized characters from the latest trend, the next step forward for Mortal Kombat on film would utilize the related notion of starting things over. On June 8th<\/span>, 2010, director Kevin Tancharoen uploaded this video, titled Mortal Kombat: Rebirth, to YouTube.<\/p>\n