30 years after its debut, it’s still a miracle that Mortal Kombat ever existed
In his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway offers a succinct, highly quoted answer to the question of how a person goes bankrupt. “Two ways,” he writes. “Gradually, then suddenly.”
“Gradually, then suddenly” may also describe how Mortal Kombat, a game with precisely nothing to do with Hemingway (although Motaro, the Centaurian sub-boss of the third game in the series, looks a little bit like a bull), came to exist. And shook up both the fighting game genre and the stuffy establishment in the process.
In another life, Mortal Kombat — which turns 30 today — is part of a landfill of forgotten fighting game detritus from the early 1990s that desperately tried to pull bored teenagers back into arcades like a down-on-his-luck carnival barker.
The impetus for the game came from a briefly considered video game vehicle for actor Jean-Claude Van Damme, which failed to materialize for all the non-artistic reasons that make such deals fall apart. But the idea stuck around, and searching for a compelling new hook for a game, the team behind it stumbled upon the notion of going the exploitation movie route and swapping out star power for gory special effects. Incremental tweaks on the usual fighting game formula led to some big, loud changes.
“Other fighting games had this thing where you would get dizzy, and the other guy would get dizzy, and you had to accept the fact that you were going to get hit,” said co-creator Ed Boon, quoted in Steve Kent’s The Ultimate History of Video Games. “We hated the idea of being the guy who’s dizzy, but it was great to be the guy who was walking up to go beat the crap out of him, so we moved that to the end of the fight where damage was already done. We had this dizzy animation. Then at
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