Mortal Kombat 11 hasn’t had the smoothest launch. The new fighting game was criticised for being a grind-fest and more recently, there have been serious allegations of toxic work culture at NetherRealm Studios during the development cycle. If that wasn’t already enough, one of the individuals involved in the creation process has revealed how working on the latest entry in the excessively violent series eventually led to a PTSD diagnosis.
During an interview with Kotaku, the individual – who requested anonymity to protect their career within the video game industry – said they spent their days throughout 2018 viewing violent animations and referring to “real-life” research material to create overly gory in-game animations while breaking down each cinematic sequence frame-by-frame.
“You’d walk around the office and one guy would be watching hangings on YouTube, another guy would be looking at pictures of murder victims, someone else would be watching a video of a cow being slaughtered.”
After roughly a month, all of this violent content took its toll on this particular developer, resulting in a loss of sleep due to graphic dreams:
“I’d have these extremely graphic dreams, very violent.”
They then saw a therapist, who diagnosed them with post-traumatic stress disorder – which is believed to be because of Mortal Kombat and its explicit development process. Apparently, this particular individual wasn’t alone, with other co-workers who eventually left also suffering from “similar problems” during the creation of the game.
Warner Bros. Games and NetherRealm Studios did not respond to this story. Read the full report here.