My Top 100: #72 – Mortal Kombat (1992)

 

I know this version of the game was mostly known as the weakest due to censorship, but let’s face the facts – in terms of sound and graphics, the Super NES port of Mortal Kombat was the best one out there.  I’ll let the video below do the talking, but even without the blood and gore, the animation and sound effects from this version is head and shoulders above the rest.

Even the Sega CD port looked terrible in comparison!

 

 

I’ve mentioned it before, but I never really paid attention to the hype surrounding Mortal Kombat until a couple of my friends got it the Christmas after it came out.  Josh seemed to know all the moves, probably having memorized them from a prior issue of EGM.  They were so simple to pull off, and the controls were so much…  lighter?  I’m still not sure how to describe it, but MK characters seemed to be much more flexible and easy to control, compared to the slow and laboured movements in Street Fighter II.

It’s all a matter of preference, I guess.

Anyway, I wasn’t really aware that you could actually pull off special “finishing moves”.  Yeah, it said “Finish Him!”, but I thought it was just so that it gave you time to end the round in whatever show-off kind of way you wanted to, using moves you already knew.  Using Scorpion, Josh held Block and pressed Up twice, and my view of gaming changed forever.

 

 

The way Scorpion TOOK OFF HIS FACE (!!!) and left his opponent as a pile o’ bones…  it quite honestly freaked me out.  I loved it!

Josh then showed me a few other finishing moves, the coolest being Raiden’s electrocution into a pile of ashes, and Sub-Zero’s freeze-and-shatter.  These were absolutely brutal, and I thought about them a lot.  I wouldn’t say I had nightmares about them, but I definitely had a dream or two about stuff I had seen in Mortal Kombat.

As I came to find out one of those times I borrowed my cousin’s Sega Genesis, there was a whole level of brutality that I had been completely unaware of.  I’m not sure if it was an issue of GamePro or EGM, but I was aware of a “DULLARD” code (Down, Up, Left, Left, A, Right, Down) that would unlock a few things, including blood.  That was somewhat of a big deal!  If this code worked, I was in for many more messed up dreams.

It did work, and I got to witness that pivotal moment in gaming history; the one move that single-handedly caused the creation of a video game ratings system…

 

 

Yeah, it was violent, more violent than most of what we’d seen up until then; but that’s not what keeps me coming back to the Mortal Kombat series today.  There’s always something to see that you’re not quite expecting – some random character appearing in the background, or perhaps a hilarious glitch that just might have been done on purpose – and it all stems from the mystery and sheer messed up-edness of that first game.