Mortal Kombat
Posted by 2Three
The game that changed everything. It was violent, gory, and let you brutally kill your opponents with a ‘Fatality’ move after defeating them. Nice. The MK series in general always garnered its fair share of controversy, and it all started with the fist entry of the series. Now videogames are always targeted by activists that tend to believe that violent games are a bad influence on youth. Mortal Kombat was one of the first.
Few people will ever forget the first time they saw Mortal Kombat in action. I remember going to my local arcade and there was a crowd of people gathered around a new unit. Curious as to what the fuss was all about, I headed over to inspect and my jaw dropped. Beautiful graphics with digitized actors playing the characters… it seemed so real. Throw in the violence and blood, and you had one hooked gamer.
Instantly I was captivated by the entire Mortal Kombat universe. The characters were very original, and their special powers such as Sub-Zero’s freeze and Scorpion’s spear attack just blew my mind. As a youngster, I was very drawn into the MK universe and thought that the entire concept and back story was extremely intriguing. It’s too bad that the current MK storyline in the more modern versions has become such a silly, incoherent mess. There was a time when it was pretty cool.
Nonetheless, the first Mortal Kombat was extremely successful and can be remembered as a premiere and influential fighter from the era. The arcade version was the most fun to play as it offered the best graphics and sound, but the home conversions were all fairly decent as well. This game was released for all of the home systems of the time including the SNES, the GameBoy, Genesis and Game Gear.
This game also was a pinnacle in the 16-bit console rivalry, because the SNES and Genesis versions both offered very different game play experiences. The SNES version was an eyeful with better graphics and sound, but the Genesis had speed and the famous ‘blood code’ on its side. Remember, Nintendo was very anti-violence at this time and the Super NES version of MK I had no blood. It even toned down some of the Fatalities as well. For example, Sub-Zero’s famous ‘spine-rip’ Fatality was edited to a more PG-13 version on the SNES, where he would freeze his opponent and finish them off by shattering them with an uppercut. Still kind of gory, but didn’t offer the dripping blood from a severed head like the Arcade and Genesis versions did.
For this reason, the Genesis version was a bit more popular because it sported blood and offered Fatalities that were true to the Arcade. For me though, I enjoyed both. The blood, gore and speed of the Genesis edition was a lot of fun, but the cleaner graphics and inclusion of voice-overs in the SNES version made that one an enjoyable experience as well. Plus I really dug Sub-Zero’s ice-shatter Fatality on the SNES, even though it was not true to the Arcade version or as shocking as the spine-ripper. Both have become staples to the series, however. Each game has offered some form of an ice-shatter Fatality for Sub-Zero, and the spine-rip has been re-invented a couple of times as well.
Mortal Kombat went on to be massive hit, with tons of sequels, spin-offs, movies, cartoons, comics and endless merchandise. It’s still kicking around today, though it is not quite as popular as it once was. Mortal Kombat 8 is coming out soon enough for the current-gen systems and should offer fans of the series a great trip down memory lane, even though the glory days of the series ended long ago.
This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 6:16 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.