At Midway Winter Gamers Day 2007, the folks from Game Informer also got the chance to sit down with Mortal Kombat creative director and series co-creator Ed Boon. Of course, the topics of the day were Mortal Kombat: Armageddon for the Nintendo Wii and the yet-to-be-named Mortal Kombat 8. While most of the material covered in both topics were also covered in our own interview, Game Informer did learn that not only will Mortal Kombat 8 use Epic Games's Unreal Engine 3 (which powers such games as Gears of War, Rainbow Six: Vegas, and Unreal Tournament 3), Ed was actually heavily inspired by the look of Gears of War. From the interview:

GI: How far into development is it?

Boon: The main thing we’re doing right now is the core technology. We’re using the Unreal 3 engine, and we’re getting our base, “How do display a character, normal-mapping, bump-mapping, shadows” all the things that are expected of the game. I have a bunch of ideas on paper in terms of things that I’d like to theoretically try, but it’s not like it’s in a playable state yet.

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GI: How has the experience been with the next-gen, and what are some of the nuances that you’re finding with the Xbox 360 and PS3?

Boon: Our goal, graphically, with this game is to be as gritty and—I don’t like to use the word “dirty,” because I don’t want to imply not-cool graphics—but a very dark, serious Mortal Kombat. Not vibrant, saturated colors, but more of a really down and dirty Mortal Kombat game. To me, when I saw Gears of War, I was like, “Holy s___! That’s the look that we’ve been talking about.” Visually, that’s what we want to do. Gameplay-wise, I kind of attribute it to what we did with Deadly Alliance, where everything is thrown out. We’re not going to have three fighting styles, we’re not going to have the same punches and kicks and the same kind of control scheme. Everything is getting trashed. We’re reinventing everything from the ground up. We really think that’s needed—you know, we’re on Mortal Kombat 8, in a sense—to kind of wipe the slate clean every once in a while, and I kind of feel that now is the time. Our visual presentation and our game presentation and our thing that you’ll hear about very soon are all going to be new to this game. It’s going to be nothing like you’ve ever seen before.

To read the interview in its entirety, click here.

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