Ed Boon

Ed Boon is a programmer, not an actor, and the screen credits gathered here are spillover from the other career. He is from Chicago, and with John Tobias he created Mortal Kombat, the fighting game that took digitised actors and unusually literal violence and turned them into a cultural argument that ran for years. He has led the series ever since and directed the Injustice games.

What lands him among screen credits at all is that he never fully handed off Scorpion. He voices the character in the 1995 Mortal Kombat film and again in Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, and does the same voice in an episode of Drawn Together, which is a strange and slightly wonderful use of a game designer's afternoon. He is credited as a creator on the web series Mortal Kombat: Legacy, appears as himself in Superpowered: The DC Story, and has a bartender part listed in the 2026 Mortal Kombat II.

The through-line is worth naming. Most franchise architects become executives and stop touching the work. Boon kept the microphone. Whatever you make of the games, and the later decades of them are far better made than the first, the series has stayed recognisably one person's sense of humour, which at that size is rarer than it should be.