100 Greatest Video Game Franchises by Mejia Robert Banks Jaime Adams Aubrie

Author:Mejia, Robert,Banks, Jaime,Adams, Aubrie [Adams, Robert Mejia;Jaime Banks;and Aubrie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
Published: 2017-06-08T14:51:47+00:00

Mortal Kombat

(est. 1992)

Platform: Arcade

Developer: Midway Games

Home to arguably one of the most recognizable phrases to come out of video games in the early 1990s—“Finish Him!”—Mortal Kombat (MK) has been an extremely successful video game franchise and cultural staple for more than twenty years. Since its inception in 1992, the franchise has gone on to sell more than 26 million copies across twenty-one titles.16 Beyond MK’s success in the video game market, the series has also spawned two movies, a trading-card game (1995), two TV shows (1996 and 1999), several comic books (1993–2013), a live stage show (1995), several video game tournaments held every year, a techno-music album (1994), clothing and accessories, and most recently, a Web series (2011–2013). The ability of MK’s aesthetic and trademark hyperviolence to persist across various media forms illuminates the appeal—and problems—of uncharacteristic realism in video games.

Originally, MK was intended to be a video game adaptation of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s movie Universal Soldier (1992); however, the small, four-man development team could not obtain a license to the movie. Rather than dropping the project entirely, the team decided to continue but with a few changes. MK creators Ed Boone and John Tobias wanted to create a game that was more “hard-edged and serious” than its inspiration. Thus they incorporated elements of Chinese mythology, kung fu movies, and 1970s over-the-top exploitation films in creating what is one of the most controversial and successful game franchises of all time.17

Boone and Tobias’s design decisions made MK an innovator in the fighting game genre. Early fighting games generally had animated characters, very little blood, and no finishing moves. Games like Fatal Fury (1991) and Street Fighter (1987) were considered technical precision games for which players had to master complex button and joystick combinations to execute the strongest attacks, while knowing how to properly block and move around the screen against an opponent—the design privileged challenging gameplay over realism and drama. Tobias and Boone’s MK’s design, in contrast, was focused on making players feel like they were doing damage when they attacked their opponent rather than precisely executing a series of commands. In order to achieve this, precision controls were simplified in favor of more realistic visual and aural cues: excessive amounts of blood, garish sound effects, and—at a time when most fighting games were using cartoonlike graphics—photorealistic sprites. Finally (and most infamously), MK introduced fatalities, or final deathblows, that allowed a victorious player to kill his or her opponent in remarkably brutal ways. Players were no longer just playing to beat each other, they were playing to completely eliminate their opponent—earning the right to pull off gruesome moves, such as Sub-Zero’s signature manual decapitation.

The popularity of this realistic approach to the fighting genre paid off for the developers, and the popularity continued in 1993 with the release of Mortal Kombat II (MKII). Video game arcades experienced a resurgence during the 1990s, and the average arcade cabinet was selling around five thousand units over its market lifetime. According to newspaper reports at

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