The Evolution of Mortal Kombat: Digitized Karnage
Part one of the evolution of fighting game royalty
In 1992 the fighting game landscape was a different beast than it is today. Street Fighter II had only released the previous year, igniting the first wave of tournament fighters gunning for a slice of that sweet, sweet arcade money. Unlike modern times where a new IP struggles to gain more than a slight amount of market share, companies were more willing to throw ideas against the wall to see what might stick. One of these companies was Midway, one of the largest arcade machine manufacturers in America.
What Midway released would become a series of games that is still seeing new entries released to this day — Mortal Kombat. The fighting franchise has had several, distinct eras, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. In this series, I would like to track what made these eras both similar and different from what was coming out at the time. I’ll also track the evolution of the series from the rather shallow first game to the release of one of the most popular fighting games in the world with the 11th entry.
Due to the nature of this retrospective and the sheer amount of games covered, this is part one. Each of these articles will cover an era of the series, so sit back and relax.
Mortal Kombat Basics
Fighting games are more formulaic than a Friday the 13th sequel. At least two fighters (more if playing a tag team fighter) engage in multi-round contests, trading punches and kicks until one player loses all of their health. In addition to punches and kicks, characters often have access to special moves which serves to differentiate the characters and add strategic depth.
What differentiates Mortal Kombat from other fighting games? What made all the arcade-goers plunk hard-earned quarters into MK rather than another machine? The easy answer is over-the-top violence. Namely, over-the-top violence inflicted on lifelike digital actors. Mortal Kombat was the most popular game series to employ real actors, digitized into the game for players to do battle with. Each hit that connected would spawn major amounts of blood from the damaged character. At the end of a battle, the winning player would be prompted to finish their opponent with a “Fatality,” an exceedingly violent killing move adding insult to injury for the losing player.
Mortal Kombat (1992)
Like many series, the first entry in the Mortal Kombat series is rather shallow compared to the entries after. The roster is extremely small, with only 7 playable characters and two “bosses” that can be fought at the end of the single-player campaign. Of the playable characters, there are very few special moves and only one fatality which severely limits the number of tools a player has at their disposal. Technically, combos exist but more as a bug created by moves being able to come out faster than the opponent can block instead of a created system by the developers. Extreme arcade difficulty also makes its first debut, with the AI able to read the player’s inputs and react faster than a human could react. All of this causes the original Mortal Kombat to feel clunky to play today. It’s more of a historical footnote than a game that players should be lining up to play in modern times.
Mortal Kombat rose from the ashes of a canceled tie-in with the Jean Claude van Damme movie Bloodsport. Midway was originally going to digitize the actors from the movie along the lines of their previous game Pit Fighter, but when the license fell through, creators Ed Boon and John Tobias leveraged their love of Kung Fu movies to create the game that would make them both famous.
Seeing the digitized actors in front of stylized Kung Fu tournament backgrounds was unlike anything else in the arcade at the time. I was very young, but have memories of crowds of people standing around and waiting for their turn at the machine, lines of quarters on the screen signifying a player’s place in line. It was clear Mortal Kombat was a hit in the arcades, so it was only a matter of time before home consoles became the target.
MK was quickly ported to every console imaginable in order to capitalize on the arcade success. The most famous ports were the two on the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. Due to Nintendo’s strict family-friendly policy, all of the blood was removed and replaced with grey “sweat” as well as heavily censoring the Fatalities. The Genesis version, on the other hand, was not as heavily censored and contained a “blood code” to allow for a rather uncompromised version — or as much as the Genesis hardware would allow.
In the early ’90s, video games were becoming more graphically intensive and therefore the violence presented became more explicit. In 1992 and 1993, the United States Congress held hearings on the long-term effect this violence was going to have on children. Along with Doom and Night Trap, Mortal Kombat was the game that got the most attention at these hearings. Eventually, the video game industry would self-regulate by adopting a rating system (eventually becoming the Entertainment Software Ratings Board) just like the movie industry had done decades earlier.
With all of this publicity, it wasn’t long before Midway was clamoring to make a sequel.
Mortal Kombat II (1993)
Mortal Kombat II can be described in one word: “more.” More classic fighters were added (and deleting 2) bringing the roster to 12. There were more ways to end a fight as Babalities (the loser is turned into a baby), Friendships (the winner does a funny interaction), and stage Fatalities (two stages had their own stage-specific Fatality). The fighting system was updated as well, increasing damage, adding a couple of basic punches and kicks, and even making combos more viable.
As expected, graphics also received and upgrade. Each of the fighters was re-captured leading to smoother animated and better-looking characters. The Kung Fu tournament setting was mostly scrapped, replaced with more supernatural stages, introducing Outworld into the series. Two new boss characters replaced the previous two.
I won’t talk a lot about story in these first games because, in typical arcade fighting game tradition, there’s the small setup in the attract mode (the videos that play when nobody is actively playing) and the character endings at the end of the tower (which are on shaky canonical ground). But let’s be real, the story doesn't matter a whole lot anyway.
Like the first Mortal Kombat, MKII had a ton of home ports. Nintendo, after seeing the sales between their censored version of MK and Sega’s relatively uncensored version, decided to release any censorship they had at one time asked for. This led to both of the flagship ports being rather similar with just a few small details to differentiate the two. The Super Nintendo and Genesis versions would predictably sell like hot cakes and set the stage for the next entry.
Mortal Kombat 3/Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (1995)
The original release of Mortal Kombat 3 was a divisive one. One of the main complaints was that it was missing characters such as series mainstay Scorpion. Despite this, MK3 would add several gameplay changes such as a run button and more finishing maneuvers to the formula. Probably the most long-lasting contribution to the MK formula was the introduction of pre-programmed combos lovingly referred to as “dial-a-combos”. They were called that due to the fact that they were pre-programmed series’ of button presses leading to multiple hits, like dialing a phone.
MK3 was a commercial success, but sadly not to the point that the last two had been. It was clear to the developers that a change would need to be made to ensure long-term profitability. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 was released the same year as the base MK3 reinserting the left behind characters into the game as well as adding new modes, notably 2 vs 2 multiplayer and an extra, harder difficulty mode for long time players.
UMK3 would become the defining competitive entry of this era of games. Many of the best competitors cut their teeth on this entry and there is still a slight competitive scene today. This is thanks to being the final 2D arcade release and being the most perfectly distilled essence of what a classic MK game is in performance, balance, ease of play, and tone.
The original MK3 has sadly all but disappeared from arcades, but UMK3 is still a fixture in many arcades.
Mortal Kombat Trilogy (1996)
MK Trilogy would be the first entry in the series that would not get an arcade machine officially made. It was conceived as a good all-in-one place to play Mortal Kombat on the new Nintendo 64 and Sony PlayStation consoles. Despite the fact that there was no arcade release, MK Trilogy is the best home version of the classic 2D era. Any character that was in the previous games appears and sometimes with a couple of different versions pertaining to the game that particular sprite appeared in. This includes the boss characters who are as broken as you would think.
Essentially MK Trilogy plays like MK3 and UMK3 distilled down to run on the flagship consoles. Taking the gameplay of the arcade classics and adding in every character imaginable, Trilogy is truly the Super Smash Brothers Ultimate of 1996.
That’s not to say that either of the releases was perfect as both the PlayStation and N64 versions have major problems. Most notably, the PlayStation version suffers from egregiously long load times such as between the announcer announcing the round and saying “FIGHT!”, between a character’s transformation animations which can lead to awkward match flow, and even before finishing maneuvers at the end of the match. This loading is due to the CD media used by the PlayStation and low internal memory so the game so loading is unavoidable. The N64 version has substantially less loading but has a variable frame rate which makes pulling off moves easy sometimes but near impossible in other situations. This leads to characters being more broken without any way to mitigate their overpowered design.
Trilogy is a fun version, but with UMK3 existing, and the ease at which games can be emulated in the modern era, there’s no reason to not play UMK3 if you want a perfect encapsulation of the 2D classic era of MK.
The 2D Arcade era of Mortal Kombat is both a timeless example of early fighting game evolution, but also eerily a product of the years they were made.
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