Mortal Kombat’s creator is a Street Fighter fan, but only the games

pcgamesn.com:

Mortal Kombat 1 is upon us, and the iconic fighting game series comes full circle and restarts the timeline, adjusting what we knew about all of the Mortal Kombat 1 characters. While we rethink what we knew about the series with Mortal Kombat 1, co-creator and director Ed Boon has talked about the reboot in the context of both Tekken and Street Fighter’s return, and how he felt when Jean-Claude Van Damme went to do the latter’s less-than-favorable ‘90s movie instead of his own videogame.

Considering the original Mortal Kombat from 1992 started out life as a Jean-Claude Van Damme game that fell through, seeing the action star come to Mortal Kombat 1 is quite poetic. Van Damme now plays an alternate skin for Cage, who himself is a parody of Hollywood actors, but this isn’t Van Damme’s first brush with videogames, oh no.
He starred as Guile in 1994’s Street Fighter film, and while Boon had a lot of nice things to say about the Street Fighter games in a recent interview, he was a bit less kind to the infamous movie adaptation.

“It was so long ago, I’m not even… [pauses]. Well, I’ll say it nicely: I don’t think that was the greatest film in the world,” Boon tells Rolling Stone. “I think it had novelty and it was almost like purposefully cheesy? Part of it, I couldn’t tell if it was trying to be cheesy or if it was trying to take itself seriously and they didn’t hit the mark. So if it had been this huge hit, I think we probably would have felt a certain amount of, ‘Oh man, this should have been us.’ But it wasn’t.”

By all accounts, the 1994 Street Fighter film is not good, so I can see exactly where Boon is coming from. That said, the moment when Van Damme’s Guile delivers an inspiring speech might be one of the most