We Need a Horror Villain Fighting Game ASAP

A new trailer just dropped for Mortal Kombat 1: Khaos Reigns, touting the inclusion of a new character. It’s not a new canon character, a new challenger joining the flavorless and troubled-kid margin-doodle-coded Mortal Kombat roster. It’s instead a character famous in his own right: the killer(s) known as Ghostface from the Scream movies. 

Now, credit where credit’s due. The developers killed it (pun unavoidable) when bringing Ghostface to life in-game. Unfortunately, watching the trailer didn’t make me think about Mortal Kombat at all, but something else entirely. That something being how badly and intensely the world needs a horror villain fighting game.

Watching Ghostface fight for the first time should have hit the development team like Bill Belichick watching Tom Brady replace Drew Bledsoe. They should have immediately realized that they needed to pivot, and build around this magic. If you work in fighting games, you should be able to realize in a half-second when you have a largely untapped roster of campy characters with weird backstories and an urge to kill on your hands. Hell, most of them already have special moves. You could basically print out a horror movie wiki and hand it to some 3D modelers and you're well on your way to Game of the Year. 

Now, I realize the reason this likely won’t happen, and it’s because it would involve a veritable Lament Configuration of interwoven copyrights. It’ll be a negotiation on par with the tensest of NATO meetings. But like a NATO meeting, this is for the good of the world. I, and many other people, need to see Leatherface doing his funky little dirt road dance behind a “VICTORY” screen.

It doesn’t have to just be the classic horror icons, either. Get A24 in on this. Bring in the new school. Let’s see Freddy Krueger face off against Paimon from Hereditary, commanding an army of nude old people. Give me Jason Voorhees getting blasted with Unresolved Trauma Beams by the Babadook. If you can’t get any glee out of imagining Pinhead getting sent to The Sunken Place by Bradley Whitford, we are different people. 

For the love of God, we’re good forever on palette-swapped ninjas with a dark past, or buff guys who got thrown off a cliff by their dad. Oh, your guy specializes in Wing Chun and is seeking to restore the honor of his dead master? Well, my guy puts Satan balls in dolls’ heads and makes you do a family annihilation. 

I can picture it all playing out perfectly in my mind, so much so that I’m already mad about Chucky’s tiny hitbox.