Mortal Kombat (1992 video game)

• 1. Introduction

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  Mortal Kombat, the 1992 arcade fighting game from Midway, spent six months of its development without a name. Co-creator Ed Boon later said that nobody could come up with a name "nobody didn't hate." The rejected candidates included Kumite, Dragon Attack, Death Blow and Fatality.

  Then someone wrote the word "combat" on the drawing board in Boon's office. Someone else wrote a K over the C, in Boon's words "just to be kind of weird." Pinball designer Steve Ritchie was sitting in the office, saw the word Kombat, and asked why they didn't call the game Mortal Kombat. According to Boon, the name just stuck.

  John Tobias, the game's other creator, remembers it differently. He says the name came up during the trademark process. The team had loved Mortal Combat, but it could not get past the lawyers. Either way, the misspelling turned into a habit, and the series now often swaps in a K wherever a C has a hard sound.

  That piece of mischief belonged to a project with a budget of around one million dollars. It also drew the attention of United States senators. How did a small team build a game that looked so different from its rivals? Why did its fighters seem like real people? And how did a coin-operated brawler help push an entire industry toward a rating system?

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• 2. Ten Months And A Camcorder

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  Midway handed Ed Boon and John Tobias an assignment to make a "combat game for release within a year." Both men believed the target was the hugely popular Street Fighter II. Tobias adds that the two had already pictured a game like Data East's Karate Champ, but with large digitized characters. Capcom's success with Street Fighter II, he says, helped sell that idea to management.

  Boon says the team began with four people. He was the programmer, John Tobias and John Vogel were the artists, and Dan Forden handled sound. The game was reportedly finished in about 10 months, between 1991 and 1992.

  Richard Divizio and Daniel Pesina tell a different origin. In their account, Tobias, Divizio and the brothers Daniel and Carlos Pesina first planned a ninja-themed fighter. Midway's management rejected it. Instead, the company wanted an action game tied to the upcoming movie Universal Soldier, starring martial arts film star Jean-Claude Van Damme.

  Van Damme was already negotiating with another company for a game, one that ultimately was never released. Divizio then persuaded Tobias to go back to the original idea. Van Damme still ended up in the game as a parody. Johnny Cage shares his initials, JC, and Cage's punch to the groin nods to a scene in the film Bloodsport. Tobias also credits Asian martial arts cinema as an inspiration.

  Halfway through, a test version had a limited release. A demo with only six characters, all of them male, became popular inside Midway's own offices. Management gave the team more time, and the extra months produced Sonya on the roster. An early build had even used two extra buttons, for middle punch and middle kick.

  The footage for the digitized fighters was shot on Tobias' personal Hi-8 camcorder. The finished arcade game held eight megabytes of graphics data. Each character had 64 colors and around 300 frames of animation.

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• 3. Rules Of The Fight

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  An 8-directional joystick and five buttons made up the Mortal Kombat control panel. Punches and kicks each came in high and low forms, and a dedicated block button sat beside them. Attacks changed depending on how far the player stood from the opponent.

  Matches were one-on-one. Draining the opponent's health bar won a round, and taking two rounds won the match. If the timer ran out, the fighter with more health won. A second player could also join a solo player's game mid-fight. If a game was in progress, the winner carried on alone. Otherwise the winner began a new game.

  Every fighter shared basic moves triggered by holding the joystick in different directions, including a leg sweep and an uppercut. The uppercut knocked an enemy high into the air and did heavy damage. Special moves mostly came from tapping the stick, sometimes finishing with a button press. Unlike earlier one-on-one fighters, few required circular joystick motions.

  Blocking worked differently here too. A blocking character still took a small amount of damage from regular moves, but the block button let players defend without backing away. Blockers lost very little ground when hit, which made counterattacks far easier.

  The game also introduced "juggling." A player knocked the opponent into the air and kept hitting while the enemy was helpless. The idea became popular enough to spread to many other games.

  In the single-player game, the player worked through the roster in one-on-one matches against computer opponents. The run ended in a "Mirror Match" against a copy of the player's own character. Three endurance matches followed, each pitting the player against two other fighters in a row. The timer reset between them, but the health meter did not refill. After those came the sub-boss Goro, then a final match against Shang Tsung.

  Between certain levels, a minigame called "Test Your Might" let players earn bonus points. Rapid button presses filled a meter to break blocks of wood, stone, steel, ruby and finally diamond. Only two-player mode could reach the last two materials. The minigame came back in several later entries in the series.

  The most famous rule came from a feature Boon disliked. The Fatality, a gruesome finishing move against a defeated opponent, grew out of the "dizzied" mechanic in earlier fighters. Boon hated being dizzied, though he admitted it was fun to hit a dizzied opponent for free. He and Tobias decided to move the dizzy moment to the end of the fight, after the outcome was already settled. Tobias says the game's ultraviolent content was never planned at the start. It crept in gradually as development went on.

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• 4. Fighters And Their Faces

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  Ho-Sung Pak refused to shave his head. That refusal changed Liu Kang, who had originally been envisioned as a monk. His final design came to resemble actor Bruce Lee instead. Pak played Liu Kang, a former member of the secret White Lotus Society who enters the tournament for the Shaolin temples.

  The game's seven playable characters were digitized sprites based on real actors. Elizabeth Malecki played the Special Forces agent Sonya Blade, who was inspired by actress Cynthia Rothrock. Richard Divizio played Kano, a mercenary and member of the Black Dragon crime syndicate. Kano was a cyborg with part of his face replaced by implants that fire a laser. Later games retconned his origin to an Australian background.

  Carlos Pesina played Raiden, a thunder god who competes as a mortal. The MS-DOS and console ports spelled the name "Rayden." His brother Daniel played the movie star Johnny Cage, a loose take on Jean-Claude Van Damme in Bloodsport. Daniel also played Scorpion, an undead ninja with fire powers who had been murdered by Sub-Zero.

  Sub-Zero came from a simple trick. The developers changed the yellow of Scorpion's outfit to blue and gave him ice powers. He is a ruthless assassin of the Lin Kuei clan, here to kill Shang Tsung for a large bounty. Such palette swaps would become a hallmark of the series, which kept using them to create new fighters.

  Two bosses and a secret character played by computer. Goro, a four-armed half-human, half-dragon prince of Outworld, cannot be hit by throws. His sprites came from a stop-motion model built by Curt Chiarelli. Shang Tsung, the sorcerer who can turn into any playable fighter mid-battle, was played by two actors, Eric Kincade and Ho-Sung Pak. Only Pak is credited in the game. Reptile, a green palette swap of Scorpion and Sub-Zero who uses both fighters' moves, appears only if the player meets a special set of conditions on the Pit stage.

  Even the Masked Guard in the Courtyard stage was a person, developer John Vogel.

  Rumors added fighters that were never there. One was Ermac, a name born from a text glitch. Another was Nimbus Terrafaux, a prank started by Electronic Gaming Monthly. The developers liked the idea of Ermac so much that they made him a real fighter in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.

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• 5. The Island Tournament

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  Seven locations on Shang Tsung's Island serve as the stages for a tournament set in Earthrealm. The introduction explains that Shang Tsung was banished to Earthrealm 500 years earlier. With the monstrous Goro, he took control of the Mortal Kombat tournament and tried to doom the realm.

  Goro has since won nine tournaments in a row. If he wins a tenth, Shao Kahn, Emperor of Outworld, will be allowed to take Earthrealm. A new generation of warriors has to stop him.

  According to the series' canon, Liu Kang wins under Raiden's guidance. He defeats Goro and Shang Tsung and frees the many souls that Tsung had imprisoned over the centuries. After the tournament ends, Scorpion finally catches Sub-Zero and kills him, avenging his own death.

  Sonya rescues her special forces squad from Shang Tsung. Kano slips away from the island on a boat before she can arrest him. Reptile, unsure of his fate, flees to Outworld. Raiden teleports the surviving Earthrealmers to safety as the island crumbles into the sea.

  Johnny Cage returns to Hollywood and uses the experience to revive his failing acting career. He launches a popular film franchise called Mortal Kombat. In Outworld, an angry Shao Kahn refuses to accept the result, which sets up the second game.

  In the arcade cabinet itself, little of this was spelled out. Players got character biographies during the attract mode, and a few extra details came after finishing the game with each character.

  Most of the backstory lived in a comic book. In 1993, John Tobias wrote and illustrated Mortal Kombat Collector's Edition, sold by mail order and advertised during the attract mode. Copies were hard to find outside the United States. Years later, the comic returned as a set of unlockable bonuses in Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance.

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• 6. Mortal Monday

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  Taito, which published imports of Midway's games in Japan, gave the arcade version an official Japanese release in 1992, though the game was never localized there. The bigger launch came a year later. On the 13th of September 1993, Acclaim Entertainment released the game on the Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Game Boy and Game Gear all at once. Television commercials dubbed the day "Mortal Monday," and it was one of the largest game launches of its time. A Master System version for PAL regions arrived the same day.

  The versions were not equal. The SNES version looked and sounded closer to the arcade, but controls were less precise. Nintendo's family-friendly policies turned the blood into sweat and replaced most Fatalities with milder finishing moves. A Game Genie code, BDB4-DD07, could restore the red.

  On the Genesis, a cheat code spelled ABACABB unlocked blood and the uncensored Fatalities. It nodded to the 1981 album Abacab by the English band Genesis, who shared a name with the console's North American version. That version received an MA-13 rating from the Videogame Rating Council.

  The Game Boy version was cut down heavily. It had laggy controls and a limited button layout, and it dropped Johnny Cage, Reptile and the bloodier Fatalities. A code allowed play as Goro. Johnny Cage was apparently meant to be playable, since bits of his data remain in the files. The Game Gear version added color and speed, hid the blood behind a cheat, and lacked Kano and Reptile. An NES port was planned, according to Phylene Riggs of Acclaim, but was cancelled before programming began.

  A DOS PC port in late 1993 was the most arcade-accurate. An Amiga version appeared in Europe in early 1994. The Sega CD version needed no code for the uncensored content, so it received an MA-17 rating. It had loading times and an authentic soundtrack, though some arenas played the wrong music. Some copies failed on model 1.1 of the Sega CD, and Acclaim offered replacements to anyone who mailed discs to its Oyster Bay headquarters.

  In Japan, the game came out as Mortal Kombat: Legend of the Advent God Fist. An Atari Jaguar conversion by Iguana Entertainment was scheduled but never released. Developer Sculptured Software proposed a Super NES update called Mortal Kombat Nitro, with new costumes, multiple endings and the original blood restored. A prototype was made, but work stopped so the team could focus on the Mortal Kombat II port.

  Later re-releases included a 2004 Jakks Pacific TV game, a bonus emulation in Mortal Kombat: Deception, and a 2005 compilation. On the 31st of August 2011, Warner Bros. Games released Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection.

  The brand spilled well beyond the games. In May 1994, The Immortals released a techno album with themes for each character. One track, "Techno Syndrome," was later adapted for the 1995 film soundtrack. It carried the "Mortal Kombat!" yell from those Mortal Monday commercials.

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• 7. Crowds And Critics

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  In September 1992, RePlay reported Mortal Kombat as the second most popular upright arcade cabinet in the United States. It then topped RePlay's upright chart in October and November 1992, again in February and March 1993, and once more in November 1993. Play Meter put it first in December 1992. By the end of 1993 it was one of the top two highest-grossing arcade games in the country, alongside NBA Jam, and it out-earned the 300 million dollar domestic box office of Jurassic Park.

  Home sales were bigger still. In November 1993, Acclaim announced more than three million copies shipped across the SNES, Genesis, Game Boy and Game Gear versions. The game sold 3 million copies worldwide in its first three weeks. The Genesis version became the best-selling console game of 1993 in the United States. By July 1994, console versions had sold over 6 million units and grossed more than 300 million dollars.

  As of 2002, the arcade version had sold 24,000 units and grossed an estimated 570 million dollars. Counting licensing fees from films and TV shows, total revenue reached 1.5 billion dollars.

  The critics were less unanimous. Computer and Video Games and Sinclair User gave the arcade game mixed reviews. They praised the digitized graphics, comparing them favorably with Pit-Fighter, but ranked the gameplay below Street Fighter II and Fatal Fury 2.

  Home versions fared better. GamePro found the SNES graphics closer to the arcade than the other early ports. It said the replacement finishing moves "are pretty cool, though not as bloody." Yet the censorship hurt sales, and gaming media criticized it for decades. In 2006, IGN named that port the eighth worst arcade-to-console conversion.

  GamePro called the Game Gear version "everything its 16-bit big brother is, plus it's portable," and it won GamePro's 1993 hand-held game of the year. The same magazine judged the Game Boy version the worst of all, with unresponsive two-button controls. The Sega CD version drew harsher criticism for lag and long load times.

  Retro Gamer later ranked it below Street Fighter II on mechanics. The magazine's reviewers still concluded the game "proved that you didn't need to have amazing game mechanics in order to be popular."

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• 8. The Senate Hearings

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  Senators Joseph Lieberman and Herb Kohl led hearings on video game violence in late 1992 and 1993. Mortal Kombat was one of several violent games that rose to prominence in those years, alongside Night Trap, Doom and Lethal Enforcers. Parents and public officials were alarmed.

  Legislators were especially bothered by realistic replicas of human figures, which they distinguished from cartoonish characters in violent games like Eternal Champions or Time Killers. That distinction pointed directly at Mortal Kombat's digitized actors.

  The hearings ended with an ultimatum. The entertainment software industry had one year to form a working rating system, or the federal government would build its own. The result was the Entertainment Software Rating Board, which required every game to carry a rating on its packaging. The home releases of Night Trap and Lethal Enforcers were part of the pressure, along with Mortal Kombat.

  Electronic Gaming Monthly named it the "Most Controversial Game of 1993." In 1995, the Daily News wrote that the controversy over its blood-gushing special effects "only served to boost its popularity."

  The arcade machine that began as a small project with a nameless title was later recognized in other ways. In 2019, The Strong National Museum of Play inducted Mortal Kombat into its World Video Game Hall of Fame.

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