By the time the Street Fighter sequel was enjoying its wide success in the early 90’s, Midway, the North American company that owned its fame to Pac-Man’s distribution, came up with the idea of creating a new title capable of stealing the spotlight from Capcom’s game.
To manage this, they hired the services of the illustrator John Tobias and the programmer Ed Boon. This boys who were fans of martial arts movies, made a proposal to the company, to make a game with Jean-Claude Van Damme as the protagonist, but a tiny inconvenient came along, the Hollywood star had a contract with Capcom to make the first Street Fighter movie adaptation.
After all this, Tobias and Boon had to start from scratch and create a new an interesting concept that combined martial arts, magic, ninja clans, old Japanese legends, modern military elements and even movie stars; all of that wrapped in a type B plot. That’s how Mortal Kombat was born, a game that made this passionate industry grow.
Released for arcades in 1992, this title tells us the story of how an old wizard called Shang Tsung, an habitant of the Earthrealm, organized a martial arts tournament between the earth fighters and some of the most despicable fighters of his kingdom. If his warriors win, earth will fall.
With this plot worthy of a low budget film, the characters of Liu Kang, Johnny Cage, Sub-Zero, Scorpion, Sonya Blade, Kano, Reptile and Raiden were introduced. All these fighters had personal interests to win the tournament, and stories that entangled with backgrounds of other combatants.
The fighting system of the game cut down the six SFII buttons and left it at four buttons, one for each extremity, with a fifth button to block. But the true novelty, the one thing that managed to gather everyone around in the Arcades, were the fatalities, a bloody and gory final move that make an spectacle of our victory.
Another difference that made this title stand out was the decision of the to do away with the traditional animated graphics that looked cartoonish, and instead, chose to hired professional actors to capture their movements and create digitalize graphics that looked realistic for the era.
Besides, when it comes to the topic of violence, this game marked a precedent, a before and after, by being explicitly gore, the home console conversations were not easy to make. On one hand, Nintendo refused to portray that level of violence due to their family-friendly politics; they replaced the blood with sweat and censored the bloodier fatalities. This made fans of the arcade version upset at seeing the final result, curiously, the rival company, Sega, did take the risk of publishing the game with all the explicit fatalities and blood.
Luckily, things changed with the imminent arrival of the game’s sequel, as Nintendo had to adapt its anti-violence rules to the demand of the market of the time. That way, MK2 reached Super Nintendo completely, with all its bloody details, and managed to become one of the best arcade to home console conversions of all times.
Anyway, Mortal Kombat was something huge, it opened the gates to a big universe filled with incredible characters and interesting stories that have not just appeared in great games, but also on movies, television, comics, toys and multiple crossovers, so I have nothing more to add other than long live to this popular franchise.
Never knew this still exist, played it long ago. I guess things just dont get old
Yeah, games like this are timeless.
Only every played this on arcade machines. Great fun battling it out with friends.
Play this game in arcades was something unique, I miss those good old days.
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