The Legacy of Mortal Kombat

The gaming world was in need of something shocking and fun in the late 80's. We had played our fill of Mario, explored and seen all there was too see in Hyrule, and beat up as many cheesy characters as we could possibly stand in basic fighting games for the NES and in the Arcade. We as gamers were facing dark times. There would always be adventure games, and RPGs but the fighting genera was left out of the mix, what were we going to do? Well in 1992 Midway came to our aid with its classic and controversial game Mortal Kombat!

The original Mortal Kombat game was developed by Midway as a response to the success of Capcoms arcade game Street Fighters and Street Fighters II. The idea and storyline of the game were conceived in 1991 and the game was released in the American market by 1992. Almost immediately the game received criticisms for many of its graphic and unusual features.

First and foremost the game had an overabundance of blood and gore depicted. Each time you landed a punch or kick your opponent would bleed massively, and the games famous uppercut move would send a foe flying through the air in a very theatrical style. Also the game proposed another gory gesture in the form of finishing moves. These special moves were the ultimate way of completely defeating an opponent by actually killing them in some fashion. Johnny Cage would kick a character so hard they would break their back, Sub Zero would freeze an opponent then break the body, and most gruesome of all was Kano, who would rip out an organ (thought to be the heart) and bite it. The move by Kano is even disturbing by today's standards, but the rest of the game and violence was just plain fun. Also the creators have a habit of replacing the hard "c" sound with a "K" like in the word Kombat

The game play was so different from anything else at the time that it drew in more and more fans. The character designs for the first games in the series both for the home and Arcade versions of the game, were live actors performing moves and transferred into a 16 bit game. Also the amount of special moves featured for each character was astonishing. With Street Fighter your characters strength was predetermined, such as speed, height, special move power, normal move power and so on, each character had different stats that made him or her better or worse against other characters. Mortal combat however used the same stats for each character, but assigning an assortment of different special moves to each. Doing so caused mixed criticism from players.

On one had, play was fair and balanced, it all came down to who was truly the better gamer. But on the other side of the argument it was pointed out that the overall strategy of the game was lacking due to the equality of all the characters. In the end we need only look at the multiple expansions of the series to see who was truly correct. The fairness of game play coupled with the abundance of awesome secret moves won the gaming public over.

Mortal Kombat as a series has done so much with just one character, and what I mean is this. The ninja assassin characters in the game, Smoke, Noob Saibot, Sub Zero, Scorpion, Reptile, Rain and Ermac are all the same person, just in different colors. Kitana, Mileene, Jade, again are all the same just different outfits, and the same goes for the cybernetic characters, Sector, Cyrax and Smoke (The cybernetic version of the ninja). The great difference is in each characters moves and fatalities. These copy pasted characters make up over one fourth of all Mortal Kombat Characters from the launch of the original series to date.

The amount of blood, gore and violence on the game caused alarm from most of the public and actually helped with the creation of the ESRB, Entertainment Software Rating Board which gave Mortal Kombat an M for mature rating in its day. In sequels to the original game you were able to perform more then just fatality finishing moves. You were given the option to perform a new kind of death sequence known as an animality where your character would change into an animal and kill an opponent, and to poke fun at those who had bashed the game two other sequences were also added. The Babeality was a finishing move in which your opponent would turn into a child version of themselves and the friendship move was where you and your opponent became buddies at the end of the bloody conflict.

The series has truly come a long way since its early days. Mortal Kombat 4 was the first game rendered totally in 3D and games like Mortal Kombat Shaolin Monks was a recently released cooperative action based games where players could control the lives of famed warriors Liu Kang and Kung Lao. Also two full length moves were spawned from the series; the first was Mortal Kombat reliving the events from the first game in theatrical form. The second was Mortal Kombat Annihilation based on characters and events from the next two installments of the series. Here we see the death of famed character Johnny Cage, a heartbreaking loss.

The story of Mortal Kombat has always been interesting, and if you actually keep up with the games only one true tournament was ever held to decide the fate of earth realm. The very first game was a tournament held to decide Earths fate while the second game was to showcase a false tournament, a distraction in order for the emperor of Outworld, Sho Kahn to resurrect his dead wife and merge the two realms of Earth and Outworld. The rest of the games following the original two are based on wars waged between realms and the warriors from each.

Mortal Kombat was one of the first fighting games to feature secret characters and Easter eggs hidden thought each game. In the first installment the player could unlock Reptile by performing a combination of moves at the pit stage, and many other characters became available in later games as levels or tasks were completed. Also many inside jokes and funny content show up in the series. President of Probe Software Fergus McGovern is seen as a shadow flying across the moon in the original game during a fight on the bridge and Raiden will Yell "Fegality" if you execute a sequence of moves in the armory stage of Mortal Kombat 3. Also mini games have been a secret unlockable part of the series since the release of Mortal Kombat II with games like Galaxian and Galaga.

One character featured in later games was actually created because of rumors circulating about his existence. It was said that a game glitch in the first games could cause Sub Zero and Scorpion to merge into a single character, a red ninja assassin by the name of ERMAC, which was a computers short hand for Error Macro. Because of this rumor game designers decided to take the character sprite of the ninja assassin character, make him red and call him Ermac in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 for the Sega Genesis.

So there in a nut shell is the Legacy of the Mortal Kombat series. It has endured for over 15 years and is still going strong. There are 16 current working titles involving characters from the series for almost every home gaming system, including Super Nintendo, Sega, Dreamcast, Xbox, Game Boy and more. Plans are in the works now to release the newest game Mortal Kombat 8, we should see some signs of its development soon, but we should have plenty of other things to do until then, like learn every characters fatality moves, figure out how to unlock reptile, beat Mortal Kombat Chess and more, until then stay "Toasty" Guys!