In Mortal Kombat II, about one uppercut in a hundred ends differently. A small face appears in the bottom corner of the screen and shouts one word in a high, strained falsetto: 'Toasty!' The face belongs to Dan Forden. He was the person who made the game's sounds.
The joke has a plain origin. According to Dominic Cianciolo, NetherRealm's story and voice-over director, who told the story to Ars Technica in 2020, Ed Boon and Forden used to play a lot of the football games they were building together. Before each play, players could trade taunts, something like 'you're toast.' The two shortened it to 'Toasty!' and said it in a silly high voice. Designer George Petro suggested putting it into Mortal Kombat as an inside joke. Boon proposed that Forden's face would pop up during roughly one percent of uppercuts. Cianciolo says Forden did not think anyone was taking the idea seriously until Boon suggested it one day.
Before any of that, Forden's job was typing. At Williams, the pinball and arcade company, the sound hardware for a game like Arch Rivals was an eight-voice Yamaha FM synthesizer chip. Drums and music had to share those eight voices. 'You were literally typing out notes,' he told Time Extension, and in his words, you were 'basically just throwing stuff at the wall to see what worked.' He had been in the industry since 1988.
At Williams he met Ed Boon. Their first project together was the pinball machine Black Knight 2000, which Boon programmed. Then came High Impact Football, and then Super High Impact. After that, Forden says, 'he and John approached me to work on this new game that was inspired by martial arts fighting.' The John was John Tobias. With John Vogel, the four of them were the whole team.
For the first Mortal Kombat, released in arcades in August 1992, Forden worked on a Sound Designer II system, which he describes as a precursor to Pro Tools and, at the time, just a two-channel stereo digital audio system. The team had been watching kung fu films, and they did the same thing with sound that they were doing with blood. 'Everything that we did, at least in the first game, was turned up to 11,' he said.
For Mortal Kombat II, Midway's Data Compression System took away the old limit. 'You could basically record any sound you wanted and put that in the game,' Forden said. In that interview he describes pulling sounds from sound-effects CDs and running them through EQ and digital delay. Ed Boon later credited Forden's audio with the sound of the uppercut, the announcer's laugh, and the 'DUN DUN DUN' that plays before a fatality.
Forden worked for roughly ten years from a home studio, producing music and sound for the series from there, and he was audio director at NetherRealm on Mortal Kombat X, Mortal Kombat 11, and Mortal Kombat 1. He retired on October 1, 2025, after 37 years. Boon wrote that Forden 'single handedly created a literal atmosphere that played a major role in the feel and vibe of Mortal Kombat.' Forden's own farewell was short: 'We made a lot of fun stuff over the years.' He signed it, 'Live long and… Toasty!'
A joke made between two friends over a football game has now been heard by players for more than thirty years. What is the thing in your own work that you were sure nobody was taking seriously, and who is hearing it now?