If you were into one-on-one fighting games in the '90s and 2000s, you were either Team Streetfighter (intense, precise, all about the craftsmanship) or you were a Mortal Kombat loyalist (cartoonishly violent, gory, all about macabre humour and showmanship). The game that Midway launched eventually, Mortal Kombat (1992), would go on to become one of the most immediately identifiable video game franchises of all time. The character, Johnny Cage, was a brash, cocky Hollywood martial arts star whose ego often came in the way of his skills - he also shared Van Damme’s initials. But Tobias and Boon used the experience to create a new character for the game they ended up developing. Unfortunately for Midway, the Van Damme deal never materialised. How the Hollywood strike has kept the Venice Film Festival 2023 unfazed | Explained If you take a shot every time Barbie says patriarchy, you'll pass out: Elon Musk takes a dig at the film 'Barbie' Van Damme, a skilled martial arts practitioner nicknamed “the muscles from Brussels," was known for introducing a more realistic, brutal form of hand-to-hand combat to Hollywood, courtesy films like Bloodsport (1988). In Cyberpunk 2077, the digitised likeness of Reeves is a playable character and, of course, the actor has done extensive voice work to lend star quality to the gameplay.īack in 1991, however, the idea of playing a video game as a digitised Hollywood star held considerable novelty value, which is why the erstwhile Chicago-based video game company Midway was approached to create a gaming version of the then-upcoming Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Universal Soldier (1992).Ĭomic book artist John Tobias and programmer Ed Boon thought that featuring Van Damme as a playable character would be a big hit among fans.
By contemporary standards, a major Hollywood star like Keanu Reeves headlining a video game (in his case, Cyberpunk 2077 from last year ) is not particularly remarkable.
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