It’s The End Of An Era For Mortal Kombat

It’s the end of an era for Mortal Kombat, although I suspect there are more than a few gamers who saw this one coming. This year saw the release of the live-action Mortal Kombat 2 movie, but things have been fairly quiet for the bloody brawler series on the gaming front. While we wait for official news on Mortal Kombat 13, the current Mortal Kombat is the not-at-all confusingly titled Mortal Kombat 1.

Released back in 2023, Mortal Kombat 1 has managed to sell 8 million copies in the last three years, although apparently this wasn’t good enough for publisher Warner Bros. What this will mean for Mortal Kombat 13 remains to be seen, but the latest big development in the Mortal Kombat gaming world is that Mortal Kombat 1′s Denuvo has been cracked.

Mortal Kombat 1 Held Strong For Three Years

Mortal Kombat 1 Definitive Edition Characters, featuring Liu Kang, Sub-Zero, and Scorpion.

For those that might not know, Denuvo is a digital rights management (DRM) software used by video game publishers to prevent piracy. Or to attempt to prevent piracy, at any rate. It’s a fairly controversial software, mostly because it requires periodic online check-ins to make sure you actually own a legitimate copy of the game, but also because Denuvo can (not always) impact the performance of certain games.

After holding strong for three years, Mortal Kombat 1 is the latest game to have had its Denuvo anti-tamper protection bypassed. It’s worth noting the last game in the series, Mortal Kombat 11, had its Denuvo officially removed by Warner Bros. in 2022, three years after the game released. It’ll be interesting to see if Warner Bros. responds to the Mortal Kombat 1 crack by doing something similar.

To be super clear, we’re not here endorsing piracy, and we’re certainly not telling you to go and steal Mortal Kombat 1. However, after three years, it’s definitely noteworthy that this game’s Denuvo has been cracked. Why now? And why did it take this long? Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced was cracked in a matter of weeks, but it’s worth noting Denuvo doesn’t exactly have a one-size-fits-all method. It’s very much a different process for every game that uses it. Either way, this is very much the end of an era for Mortal Kombat, even if it wasn’t a particularly exciting one.

Looking ahead, it certainly looks as if Mortal Kombat 13 is on the way, even if it hasn’t been officially announced yet. Over on Reddit, one user shared a post featuring a quote from the director of the Mortal Kombat movie adaptation Simon McQuoid, who revealed a little bit about the series’ future.

“I love what Ed and the team did with Mortal Kombat 1,” he said. “I know that’s kind of the most recent, but the different games have different things that are good. I just love that they got to this point and they’ve sort of reshuffled the deck, and I think that proves to everyone that… I just like the way the story was told and also the way it played out. I certainly know from the little bits that Ed’s told me about what’s coming up. It’s very exciting what they’ve got. I can’t divulge anything—that would be wrong of me—but pretty exciting what they’re cooking up. I think the next thing they do, it’s going to be great. So, I’m really looking forward to that.”