Every year, it falls primarily on me as the editor of Can I Play That to recognize the best accessible game of the calendar year. In the past, I’ve tried to ensure that the Diamond Award goes to the company that makes the single greatest advancements in accessibility. The downside of this approach is that it does not always recognize developers who work hard on accessibility every day. Only to be overshadowed in the press by studios with more robust feature sets.
Accessibility awards often go to games making the biggest splash, skipping over those studios pushing the boundaries of accessibility. Not through big public accessibility initiatives, but through quiet, constant pressure. These ensure that the discipline keeps expanding to improve the experience for more and more gamers. In a very real sense, the studio behind 2023’s Diamond Award winner is one of the grandfathers of game accessibility. Always doing phenomenal work in the space, but never quite getting that top spot. That ends today.
Mortal Kombat 1
This year, I’m extremely proud to announce that the 2023 Diamond Award for Best Accessible Game goes to Mortal Kombat 1. Not just because NetherRealm Studios has worked for over a decade with little recognition to make arcade fighters accessible. But also because this release shows a commitment to a standard of accessibility that any game, not just fighting games, can benefit from adopting. As described in our barrier breaker announcement, NetherRealm’s approach to closed captioning and audio descriptions is an example for developers across the industry. Combined with industry leading accessibility practices since 2011, the question is not “Does Mortal Kombat 1 deserve a Diamond Award?”. Instead the question is “Why aren’t more accessibility advocates praising this studio for its decades long commitment to accessibility?”
The realities of games journalism is that the games that appeal to the broadest audience are often the games that get covered the most. Because arcade fighters are typically more narrow in their appeal, it’s very easy to view them as a standalone genre. One where the development practices established do not apply as much to broader game design. Through their emphasis on accessibility in Mortal Kombat 1, NetherRealm has shown the flaw in this assumption. They show that good accessibility is something truly transcendent of genre.
Accessibility, years in the making
Having worked on games like the Last of Us Part 2, I can tell you that sometimes studios are able to take accessibility from 0 to 100 in just a few short years. That’s not what happened here. Ed Boon and the rest of NetherRealm didn’t suddenly wake up one day with the idea to include disabled players. They’ve been hard at work since 2011 with the inclusion of audio cues and robust controller remapping. With each successive game, they’ve set a new bar for accessibility within their genre. With Mortal Kombat 1, they’ve now broken out of that genre, setting a standard that the entire industry can follow. For that, they have earned the 2023 AbilityPoints Diamond Award for Best Accessible Game.
