The PS3 version of Mortal Kombat has a special character: God of War’s colorful anti-hero, Kratos. The fury-filled Spartan (obviously) doesn’t appear in the Xbox 360 version, but the platform doesn't have its own exclusive fighter, either. But it’s not like Ed Boon and the rest of NetherRealm didn’t think about it.
"I'm not allowed to talk too much about it, but I can tell you we certainly wanted to do an exclusive for 360, but that's all I can say,” Boon told Eurogamer in a recent interview. “It was not a decision we made where we said, oh, let's not do one for the 360,” he said.
According to Boon, “circumstances” got in the way of an exclusive. Whether those were licensing issues or other contractual problems, it’s hard to say because Boon won't actually say.
NetherRealm did at least get into some form of discussion stage about what kind of dudes they’d like to bring into the Xbox 360 version. “Anybody who's really knowledgeable about the Xbox video games, the big titles, names like Master Chief from Halo, Marcus Fenix from Gears of War, and any other Xbox exclusive title, is going to come up in a conversation in talking about it. So clearly we've discussed it."
Team Ninja famously wanted to get Master Chief in its fighting game Dead or Alive 4. Instead of giving it Chief, Bungie created and then allowed Team Ninja to drop put a female, Chief-ish variant named Nicole into the game.
The good news here is the omission of Kratos in the Xbox 360 version is pretty moot. Jeff scored Mortal Kombat, which is debuting on store shelves today, a perfect five-out-of-five-stars in his review.