A key period for the evolution of the fighting game, the early 90s marked the arrival of two pivotal franchises that still exist and flourish today: Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat. These are the titles that redefined the one-on-one beat ’em up and alongside SF2’s cartoon stylings, Midway’s digitised, violence-fuelled competitor captivated players with its memorable characters, surprisingly nuanced gameplay and buckets of blood. Highly innovative in many ways, it was put together relatively quickly by a development team of just four people.
Mortal Kombat started out as an experiment between friends John Tobias, Rich Divizio and Daniel Pesina. They filmed themselves performing martial arts moves with the idea of digitising them and putting into a game – an evolved approach to that taken by Atari with Pit-fighter two years earlier. Fellow Midway coder Ed Boon didn’t think the initial pitch to Midway would work but did like the idea of a fighting game – suggesting that none other then Jean-Claude Van Damme should star in the title. Unfortunately, Van Damme declined the project forcing the team to rethink the concept and ironically, the actor would end up starring in the movie version of Street Fighter 2.
Work pressed ahead regardless, Boon joined the development effort, the digitisation technology was further refined and the game eventually shipped to arcades. It was a technologically advanced title for 1992, based on the Midway Y-Unit arcade board previously used in games including Smash TV and Total Carnage. Its impressive specs allowed the Y-Unit board to deliver large, high colour sprites and complex parallax background scrolling – high-end features that worked flawlessly in combination, outstripping the capabilities of the home consoles of the time.
Once the game hit arcades, its mixture of a stunning presentation, comically over-the-top violence and prodigious bloodletting made it an instant hit but the core appeal of the game goes . Mortal Kombat is a simple yet nuanced fighter and while it lacks the depth of Street Fighter 2, it feels great to play at its core and learning how to wield its relatively small move set effectively is a lot of fun.
Then there are the secrets and fatalities – MK was great about teasing lore, secret characters and special moves. Much of this talk centered around the mysterious character, Reptile. This mysterious third ninja would appear every few matches dropping hints along the way. To fight him, you needed to make it to The Pit. If a shadow flies by the moon, it’s game on. Don’t block on the ensuing battle, win both rounds without taking any damage then end the round with a fatality and you’re set for your confrontation with the mystery man. These specific circumstances were extremely difficult to discover at the time, leading to crazy speculation among fans – but crucially, it was concepts like this that continued to drive people to the arcade.