October is a month dedicated to the spooky, the grotesque and the scary and the video game industry certainly doesn’t have a shortage of titles focusing on those themes. This month, I thought it might be fun to focus on some of the games that have had the largest impacts on the industry and we’re starting with one that people who don’t play video games have likely heard of.
The Mortal Kombat franchise has left an impression on the video game industry since its introduction in 1992. Ever wonder why video games have an age rating printed on the cover? You can largely thank Mortal Kombat for that.
The game was originally developed to cash in on the blossoming one-on-one fighting game genre that had come with the success of Capcom’s Street Fighter 2. The gimmick for Mortal Kombat was the winner of a fight could straight-up murder their opponent. Bloody violence in video games had already been seen in the arcades through games like 1988’s NARC and 1990’s Smash TV, the former putting players in the role of a futuristic cop gunning down drug-pushing gangs while the latter placed players in a deadly gameshow where they would shoot waves of mutants as they avoid traps, bullets and explosives. There was some blood and dismemberment in these games, but they retained a crude, cartoonish aspect to it all.
Mortal Kombat was different though. It used graphics digitized from images taken of actors performing the various moves that looked, albeit pixelated, like accurate representations of real people. The game’s “fatalities,” secret killing moves used at the end of fights, lacked some of the cartoonishness seen in those previous games as well. For example, the international criminal Kano would tear out his opponent’s heart like Mola Ram in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” while the blue-clad ninja Sub-Zero could pull his defeated opponent’s head and spinal column from their body and hold it up for all to see. There was also the matter of The Pit, a fight location where a player could knock their opponent into a pit filled with spikes. It featured the heads of the game’s development team impaled on some of those spikes. The game was a smashing success despite calls for Mortal Kombat and others of its ilk to be banned. Congressional hearings took place to debate how violent images in the medium were corrupting the youth of a nation and a rating board, the Entertainment Software Rating Board, was created by an association representing the industry’s top companies in an attempt to derail calls for censorship.
While Mortal Kombat was definitely influenced by the martial arts films of the 70s and 80s, later installments took more inspiration from horror films and leaned heavily into body horror and grotesque imagery. Several characters were introduced that had a less human appearance and looked more like creatures from a drive-in horror flick.
One such character is Baraka, a fighter who sported a killer smile of long, jagged teeth and retractable arm blades who came from Outworld, a dark and foreboding place ruled by the series’ main antagonist, Shao Kahn.
Later games would feature guest cameos taken from horror movies as well. Mortal Kombat’s remake in 2011 had Freddy Krueger from “A Nightmare on Elm Street” as a downloadable character while 2015’s Mortal Kombat X gave players Leatherface from “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” Jason from “Friday the 13th” and the zenomorph from “Alien.”
Mortal Kombat is a franchise encompassing 18 video games, as well as an animated television series and three motion pictures.
Throughout the years, the game has continued offering images of characters killing one another in oddly creative ways, though the initial controversy has largely been forgotten.
It does remain a popular game franchise that doesn’t show signs of slowing any time soon.
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