Get over here!
The Mortal Kombat series has long been a staple of the video game community—a household name synonymous with bloody, violent fun. But behind the silly costumes and over-the-top one-liners lies a surprising underdog story. 1992 was a competitive year for arcade fighting games; between the eminently popular Street Fighter II and the less popular but still good Pit-Fighter, the Mortal Kombat team certainly had their work cut out for them. With the newest Mortal Kombat movie fast approaching, it’s obvious how the story of Mortal Kombat ends—but how can you appreciate an expert finishing move if you don’t see the buttons they pressed to get there?
FRIENDSHIP!
Though Mortal Kombat is a titan of the fighting game scene nowadays, its beginnings were significantly more humble. According to Daniel Pesina (the actor who originally portrayed Johnny Cage, Sub-Zero, Scorpion, and Reptile), the game’s pitch wasn’t too far from what we got: a fighting game focused on a group of historical Chinese ninjas, the Lin Kuei. John Tobias, then a new employee at Midway Games, took the idea to his boss, Ed Boon. The initial pitch wasn’t exactly a success.
“Everyone at Midway rejected it,” said Pesina. “Ed said our idea would never work but liked the idea of a fighting game, so they cancelled ours and pursued a mainstream game with Jean-Claude Van Damme because it would make more money. I was pissed, because I gave a bunch of great kung fu ideas, and they were now going to give them all to Jean-Claude Van Damme.” (Van Damme declined to do the game, but his influence lived on in Johnny Cage, whose general style bore a strong resemblance to the action star.) Though the Van Damme plan fell through, the game was far from KO’d. Tobias re-pitched the original idea and Midway, seeing the success Capcom had found with Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, decided it might be worth a shot.
In 1991, the development team included just four people: Boon, the sole programmer; Tobias, one of the artists; John Vogel, another artist; and Dan Forden, the sound designer (best known for being the guy who pops up and says “Toasty!”). The group opted to use real actors to portray the fighters, an unusual choice for the time, and certainly not one without its challenges. Said Pesina, “We experimented with every martial art move for about three days, eight hours a day, filming and trying to figure it out. Any sort of sophisticated video game animation technology wasn’t around. What you see is videotaped footage of us doing the actual moves.”
The production was bare-bones—the team was sure this would be a small game (planning for just 200 arcade cabinets), and cut corners where they could to stay within budget. According to Pesina, “We didn’t even have mats for me to fall or do flips on.”
They filmed everything over the course of five days in a space that was, essentially, a hallway, and, during that time, finalized thousands of details, including finishing moves, catchphrases, and even weapons. Many iconic choices came down to decisions made by the individual actors. Liz Malecki, a fitness instructor who had been tapped to portray Sonya Blade, opted for army green tights to align with Sonya’s special forces background. “And since I was into aerobics,” Malecki added, “I gave her the thong that was so popular back then for women to wear in exercise classes.”
When all was said and done, Mortal Kombat stood out from its contemporaries—and not just because of its costuming choices. Unlike many other fighting games at the time, which ended each match with a knocked-out competitor, Mortal Kombat gave players the opportunity to, well, finish him. Mortal Kombat’s signature “finishing moves” were complex, violent, and gleefully gory—a spectacle for arcade-goers everywhere to laugh and wince over. This was thanks to Boon, who was tired of the cleanliness of other fighting games and, in a burst of bloody brilliance, insisted that players should have a way to “finish” their opponent off. From there, the team was a whirlwind of gory ingenuity, pitching increasingly over-the-top moves for every character.
The fighters were ready. It was time to hit the arcades.
FIGHT!
In 1992, the team planted their prototype machine in a Chicago arcade. Tobias hung around to keep an eye on things. In a blog post, he said, “Our prototype machine collected game data that we could access through its diagnostics, but nothing could recreate the players’ reactions to the game like being there to watch it firsthand. We’d take notes on things that we thought needed fixing based on how the players reacted to certain events. We tested the game for countless hours while it was under development at our offices, but nothing could put it through its paces like on-site testing and no other player feedback could be more genuine.”
At first, it seemed like no one would play the game. The machine sat untouched for hours, ignored by what few patrons the arcade had. This wasn’t totally unexpected—the team was testing the machine during the NBA Finals. In Chicago. In 1992. The arcade manager almost closed early (to avoid the inevitable riots), but a few teens entered at the last second and made their way over to the Mortal Kombat machine. It wasn’t long before the crowd around the machine had grown to be four or five people deep. Recalled Tobias, “The manager was now guarding the front door and had flipped the arcade’s ‘open’ sign to ‘closed,’ but would admit a patron if they were there to play Mortal Kombat.”
It was a sign of things to come. The game’s popularity was immediate and explosive—it soon became clear that the initial 200-cabinet run simply wasn’t enough. Fans wanted more gore, more Easter eggs, and more Mortal Kombat.
TEST YOUR MIGHT!
In spite of Mortal Kombat’s phenomenal success on the arcade scene, leaving the cabinets behind wasn’t exactly a tough call. Said Boon in an interview with Nintendo Magazine, “The decision to leave arcades was kind of made for us; the arcade market was drying up and it didn’t make much business sense to release the game in a format that didn’t have an audience. So we kind of saw the writing on the wall.”
Street Fighter II had already found success on the SNES; as a result, Midway knew there was very little risk in giving Mortal Kombat the home console treatment as well, and teamed up with publisher Acclaim to bring Mortal Kombat’s signature violence to living rooms all over the country. Well, kind of. Nintendo (at the time) upheld a strict anti-gore policy, resulting in Mortal Kombat’s Sega Genesis port outselling the Super Nintendo version 5-1. (The Genesis also included censorship, but it could be easily circumvented with the infamous “ABACABB” cheat code.) There were other unique challenges when it came to porting the game: home consoles had approximately a tenth of the power that arcade hardware did. The team resolved to approach the problem in a way no one had done previously: they converted the arcade game assembly code to SNES, creating and optimizing the rest manually, based on frame-by-frame analysis of the original game.
The effort was worth it. Acclaim released all four home versions of the game (SNES, Genesis, Game Boy, and Game Gear) simultaneously on what they dubbed “Mortal Monday.” The campaign was a huge success; Mortal Kombat, originally intended for just 200 arcade cabinets, spawned one of the most successful fighting game franchises in video game history, selling more than 6 million units by 1994. As of 2020, the Mortal Kombat franchise had sold approximately 54 million units to gore-lovers around the globe.
FINISH HIM!
That kind of success is hard to ignore—Mortal Kombat’s fanbase was enormous, and capitalizing on its popularity via non-gaming mediums seemed like a no-brainer. In 1995, New Line Cinema released the first film adaptation of the series, and, uh, it was fine. One of its major problems seemed to stem from its PG-13 rating. Without its signature gore, Mortal Kombat (1995) and Mortal Kombat (1992) seemed to be worlds apart. In 1997, a sequel, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, was unleashed on the public, to even worse reception. In a recent review, IGN called it “a film so brazenly stupid and poorly made it’s barely even watchable.” Once again, the film suffered from its PG-13 rating, although clearly that wasn’t its biggest problem. (It certainly didn’t help, though.)
Hopes are high for the new Mortal Kombat film, however. Between its action-packed trailer (hello, blood knife) and R-rating (HELLO, blood knife), fans are eager to see if this film will truly capture the magic of that lone Chicago arcade cabinet. Here’s hoping for a flawless victory.
