Ed Boon is the co-creator of Mortal Kombat. He did the programming on the original in 1992.
Ed Boon is the co-creator of Mortal Kombat. He did the programming on the original in 1992.
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The DeanBeat: We don’t get to celebrate games enough

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 5 min

Ed Boon was one of the elder statesmen at the Dice Awards last week. He worked on the first Mortal Kombat game with three other people 27 years ago, and here he was accepting an award for Mortal Kombat 11, which was voted the best fighting game at the prestigious awards show in Las Vegas.

I stood in the green room at the awards show, waiting with other press to interview the winners like Boon as they walked off the stage and into gaming history. Boon and the other winners got roars of applause.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.