90's Fighting Games Top 5 List- Number 5

Mortal Kombat (1992 Midway)

Why is this game at the bottom of the list instead of like, 3 or 2? Because without its additions of controversial blood and gore, this game would have surely died. This isn't saying that the original MK sucks, its... OK, but play it now if you still have your copy and tell me if it still is as fun or legendary as you remember. The first Mortal Kombat might be the most overrated game ever made, and when compared to its later sequels you'll find that the first game has some flaws, but before I cluck on about that lets look at why it rocked the gaming world.

Digitized Graphics- This wasn't the first fighting game to use digitized footage or actors in order to create its sprites. Pitfighter, one of Atari's many failures, was the first fighting game to do this. But rather than give us muddy movement and choppy animation like Pitfighter, Mortal Kombat gave us characters with some great personalities. Each character was believable and cool for the most part. MK even gave us a stop motion animated four armed monster to fight against: Goro. For the first time in gaming history we really began to feel and believe that REAL people were beating each other into a paste on screen.

Blood- The sight of bodily fluids when I first played MK was enough to scar my mind. This was 92, a time before it became the norm to have blood in a game.It was enough to also spark congressional hearings and even made it a game believed to be responsible for the rating system that now graces the cover of every game that gets released. The gore of MK is now so tame to today's standards that you almost can't believe that it caused such a problem. The added fun was being able to maim your opponents or be maimed by executing 'Fatalities' in order to finish someone off. These moves included:

Punching off someones head

Pulling off someones head

Burning your opponent into a crisp

Ripping out someones heart

Blowing up someones head

or doing whatever satisfies the Ed Gein in you.

This was another reason for controversy. It wasn't enough that your characters bled (too much sometimes) they also could murder each other. Street Fighter 2 didn't really involve KILLING anyone, which is why that game never got the attention and censorship that MK eventually received. The oppression of censorship wasn't fully realized to me until its console release.

MK on the SNES was released and was widely disappointing to many. WHY? Because the SNES might have had a near perfect arcade translation but they made a bad move, they cut out all the blood and modified some of the Fatalities to make the game more vanilla. The Genesis version gave us all the blood and was accessable via the famous 'Blood Code'. The assholes of Nintendo's marketing department may have made the biggest mistake in allowing this, and it may have been done because of the demographic of younger kids owning and SNES system and older kids owning a Genesis. The drawbacks may also have come from the 'Lets test the market' strategy of what will win: Better graphics or better action? Whatever these bozos did to ruin MK for Nintendo owners, it was short lived, because Sega and its shittier Genesis version of MK blew away Super Nintendo version in terms of sales. This move caused Nintendo to rethink things and when Mortal Kombat II arrived it pulled out all the stops and gave us all what we wanted: Blood and gore.

OOOOK... there you have it. The secret to success. Digitized graphics and Blood. This game also had other things that made it great, like its story. The games plot seemed to be a mix of Enter the Dragon with a slight fantasy film (name whatever one comes to mind) angle to it. 7 people have entered a tournament to take down the 2 corrupted leaders of that tournament: Shang Tsung, a shapeshifting sorcerror, and Goro, a 10 foot cheap sonofabitch with four arms. Whatever, did anyone really pay attention to that or were we all just too busy learning how to pull off Rayden's fatality?

These 7 fighters were a colorful lot of criminals (Kano), agents (Sonya), ninjas (Sub Zero and Scorpion) , noble warriors (Liu Kang), an egotistical actor (Johnny Cage) and even the God of thunder (Rayden). All of these fighters worked and looked great in full realistic glory (for its time), each of them with their own story and persona that made them into icons of many fighting games after. Sub-zero and Scorpion were both palette color swaps of the same ninja (along with the secret and unplayable character Reptile), this following the Ken and Ryu of SF2 idea of getting the most out of 1 design, I'm surprised they don't do something similar to that or, at least more often, in Hollywood movies. Sonya was kind of the 'token woman' that you see in a lot of fighting games, even being able to shoot pink girly rings off of her wrist, to this day I always wished they would have tried harder in developing her, it feels like they didn't try. Johnny Cage pissed me off to no end. He fought with his shirt off in a pair of spandex shorts, and he's a candy assed, Hollywood actor that loves to gloat at the end of a match by putting on his sunglasses and stare at you with a crooked smile, he just BEGS to be 'Finished' at the end of a match. As annoying as Cage was, he was so fun to hate. Sub Zero is a ninja with the ability to freeze, and Scorpion is a ninja from hell that can breathe fire in order to kill you off. Kano is a thug criminal that throws knives and rips off Blanka's Barrel roll from SF 2. He's the token badass of this game and I loved his Fatality of ripping out someones heart, too sweeeet. Liu Kang is a kind of bland kung foo master inspired by Bruce Lee, not much else to note other than the games epilogue thats explained later in MK2 suggest that he won the tournament. Then you have the God of thunder Rayden who can fly at you, pasting you to a wall while screaming something in a lauguage that I'm not even sure exists, damn that was a fun move!

But it wasn't all so sweet. The SNES version proved that this game was quite bland without all the carnage. The controls were my big gripe. I was used to holding the joystick away from my opponent in order to block attacks, but here they added a button for it. I never used it much unless I was blocking an incoming projectile. There was 4 other buttons for high-low punches and high-low kicks, but there was really no difference between a high or low attack.

The action was slow moving and felt very stiff, like the characters and their controls were 'stuck'. The fighting method of winning this game was dependant on using 'juggle' combos that consisted of hitting your opponent into the air and using whatever hits you could dish out to keep them from hitting the ground. Some arcade junkies made a lot of enemies by memorizing tricks and combos that literally gave them a 24 hit hollow victory. This is a style of fighting in a game I've never preferred because it offers you no opportunity to counter attack, you just have to sit there and wait till your plastered to the floor. Thankfully this was only something that experts you played against could do, if you played against the computer you fought someone that was either too easy or too cheap.

MK 'you vs the computer' tip: Stay away from the corner, you'll get a barrage of punches or other hits you'll NEVER escape from.

It just goes to show you, looks aren't everything. MK had flaws but the beauty part is that Midway listened to the cries and bitching of its players and delivered a sequel that gave us all that was missing from the original. This is the difference between Midway and other companies that made fighting games (like Strata), while their first show was a success, they didn't get lost in it when it came down to repeating it. In fact, MK 2 wasn't even close to a repeat of the original, it was a totally different game (more on that as this list progresses).

Regardless of slow fighting, funky controls and cheap or unimaginative AI, MK is now a classic. Right up there with Pac-man and Galaga. This game might have made MILLIONS of dollars on its arcade release alone. Rarely does a video game inspire such widespread controversy and at the same time, get so much merchandising behind it. I can remember MK action figures, trading cards, T shirts, books, a cool movie (and a shitty sequel to that movie), and apparently even a live martial arts stage show (this game even had an off Broadway spin off, amazing). Mk also has laid foundation for many fighting games after in that it told developers to not be afraid of anything. Without MK giving the mainstream the violence that sells, then even games like Grand Theft Auto (not even a fighting game) would ever be made.

All this hype over red sprites of blood that didn't even look very real in retrospect. I'm sure Midway secretly thanks the US congress for making a big deal of MK's violence, after all that was and still is the best free advertising any medium can get.