Mortal Kombat - an unmistakable victory

Today, exactly 27 years ago, it was one of the most brutal video games in history.

In the 1990s, the Japanese burst into the taboo genre with Street Fighter, Fatal Fury and Final Fight. At the other end of the world, a small team led by developer Ed Boon gets a chance to make a video game based on the then-action movie Universal Soldier. They accept this job, but through the elaboration of the idea they come up with something completely different.

Inspired by Chinese mythology and the movie "Big Trouble in Little China," they were preparing a fighting game they planned to call Dragon Attack, then Death Blow and Fatality. As they didn't like any of this, they came up with the final idea by accident - and the name Mortal Kombat turned out to be very striking.

Also striking was the gameplay segment where players completed their opponent in extremely brutal ways. The so-called Fatalityes were developed out of defiance of the tradition of Japanese martial arts games in which defeated characters always end up dazed, never killed. In Mortal Kombat, their deaths were shown in great detail, from tearing their limbs to burning a character. Fatalities were a cultural shock to players, and within a few years they had become synonymous with deadly game moves.


Apart from its brutality, Mortal Kombat was also specific about the new control schemes. It was one of the first fighting games where blocking attacks had a separate button, and performing special attacks also involved a combination with direction. Mortal Kombat was also the first tab in which an enemy could be sent into the air and struck in the air; something that is a normal thing in today's records.

Like most fighting games, Mortal Kombat is based on a story that attracted the most skilled fighters in the world. Among them were all kinds of characters, from Johnny Cage who came up as a parody on JC Van Damme, through Sonya Blade and Liu Kang. Other playful characters included the god of thunder Raiden, the famous duo Sub-Zero and Scorpion and Kano. The bosses in the game were Goro and Shang Tsung, and one secret character appeared - Reptile.


Mortal Kombat came out in 1992 on arcade machines, but after becoming very popular there, home console versions came a year later. The game was switched to SNES and Genesis devices in a graphically inferior release. However, the biggest change to the presentation was that Nintendo and Sega decided to censor the game so that blood and fatality attacks could only be experienced if the player entered the correct code. A year after that, the game came to PC on an uncensored release.

The popularity of the game entailed an unintended consequence. Mortal Kombat has been controversial in the eyes of the general public like no other game before it. Because of it, US senators pressured the video game industry representatives so that the rating system eventually had to be developed by the age rating system (ESRB) and the video game packaging clearly had to indicate the age of the game.

Despite the controversy, Mortal Kombat has received over a dozen sequels and has become an indispensable series in the martial arts genre. After a crossover title with the DC universe, the series experienced a successful reboot in 2011, and an even more successful sequel in 2015. This year we also received the 11th edition.


Of course, we cannot talk about Mortal Kombat without mentioning its 1995 film adaptation. Although the value of the film itself is virtually null and void, Mortal Kombat has been the most watched movie in the US market for three weeks, which is no small matter. Of course, the best thing about the movie adaptation of Mortal Kombat has been the main theme song "Techno Syndrome", a musical theme ... so cult and iconic that legend has it that no sentence about it is ever completed by

In 1997, a sequel to the movie, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, followed, many will agree - one of the worst films in human history; so bad that everyone should look at it at least once.



Check some of the older Mortal Kombat posts ->>

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