Mortal Kombat Masterclass

What the venerable franchise teaches us about fighting game design

Mortal Kombat 11 has been NetherRealm Studios’ most successful game launch ever. It also represents something of a franchise restoration. Through its long and storied history, Mortal Kombat has seen incredible highs and disappointing lows. Through it all, NetherRealm have continually experimented with the franchise and have often defined what we should expect from fighting games as a genre. Now that Mortal Kombat 11 has been available for a while and players have had the chance to fully-digest it, we thought we’d take a step back and consider its role in both the Mortal Kombat franchise itself, as well as the broader genre it exists within.

Round 1: The Beginning

The first three Mortal Kombat games (plus MK Trilogy) are widely considered to be the best of the franchise, and they all arrived prior to the arcade sector’s decline. Designed as a competitor to Capcom’s Street Fighter — and built with the intention of tackling the then-bureoning fighting game market — Mortal Kombat was well ahead of its time in terms of leveraging motion capture technology to represent digitized actors on screen for the bulk of its roster.