Games that changed the gaming world: Mortal Kombat

I'm old enough that I remember when this game landed in the arcades. We had seen a number of great fighting games in the past but there is no denying that the world had never seen something like this. It wasn't as technical as say Street Fighter 2 - which I consider to be a superior game - but the brutality of this game was something the gaming world had never seen before.

I was never really the kind of person that would spend a great deal of time mastering an arcade fighting game but with this one, I simply couldn't help myself. Like most other gamers at the time, I purchased the magazines that would reveal the codes for the fatalities because that was a really awesome aspect of the game.

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The reason why I say this game changed everything is not just because it was a very innovative game but also because of the way that some Karens out there made such a fuss about it. All of a sudden anything that kids did that was violent was directly because of video games and not because of bad parenting. Maybe I just had a good upbringing but I never once considered trying to rip someone's spine or heart out because of playing it.

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It made it as far as the highest levels of government in the USA and there were times that certain advocates were talking about simply banning games of this type from being made at all. Land of the free my ass. Thankfully, after much deliberation, it was simply decided that games would have a rating system a lot like movies and now you had to be a certain age, and prove it with ID, in order to purchase certain games for home consoles. Thankfully this never applied to arcades because what a nightmare that would be to have to present ID to get into an arcade like it is a disco or something.

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I suppose the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board) would have been made at some point anyway because there are people out there that are busybodies that are going to find fault in anything, but it was Mortal Kombat, and especially the violent fatalities, that first sparked the debate that lead to this board being formed in the first place. Prior to 1991 there were no regulations in the video game industry of any sort and developers could release whatever they wanted without any fear of it being given a rating that would limit the people that could buy it.

I wouldn't say that the game industry was really all that phased by this because unlike films, a "mature only" rated game is just as likely to be purchased by people as an "E for Everyone" game. I think that probably only really uptight parents would allow this to affect what games their children play and these days, the primary video game demographic is people in their 20's and 30's anyway.

Mortal Kombat was a huge success at arcades as well home consoles but I played both the SNES and Genesis versions of this game and compared to the arcade, they were both terrible. I can't remember which one it was but one of the home consoles actually had a parental lock on the game that would disable fatalities and blood. The really silly thing was that the blood was simply made blue because you were now knocking copious amounts of sweat off of your opponents body, or at least that was that it was meant to be.

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My favorite characters were Scorpion (get over here!) and Sub-Zero and they were the only 2 characters that I ever really bothered to master because the move sets for each character were different and you would need to dedicate a lot of time to remembering all of the moves for everyone. In subsequent MK games this would only become more and more complicated as dozens of additional fighters were introduced over the years.

These days the games look fantastic but they are way too complicated for someone like me. I do like watching videos of other people playing it though because the innovations to the brutality of the game is very well-done. Who would have thought that a rather simple fighting game would change the video-gaming world forever?