This week, Mortal Kombat X was announced, technically the tenth game in the series, but it depends on how you want to count unnumbered installments and spin-offs. The game will bring Mortal Kombat to next-generation consoles like PS4 and Xbox One, and will be the capstone on what’s been a truly impressive fighting franchise over the years. Well, until the next sequel that is.
The original Mortal Kombat wasn’t played on consoles, it was released in 1992 as an arcade title. Developed by Midway Games and created by Ed Boon and John Tobias, the series found so much success in arcades that a console version turned out to be inevitable.
The first Mortal Kombat was actually created around the idea of a game starring Jean-Claude Van Damme at the height of his popularity. That idea was nixed, but the character of “Johnny Cage” lived on as a parody of Van Damme, even incorporating his signature splits move into combat.
The release of Mortal Kombat turned out to be an important point of contention in the console was between Nintendo’s SNES and SEGA’s Genesis. Family-friendly Nintendo demanded a toned-down version of the game, but SEGA was content to let Midway run wild with all the violent content it wanted. It led the SEGA version of the game to dramatically outsell the Nintendo version, and allowed the Genesis to pull ahead in terms of market share.
Over the years, Mortal Kombat pumped out many sequels and the franchise has gone on to sell over 30 million copies of its various games. It was one of the first video game to attract national attention for its use of violence in an age where gaming was just evolving from rudimentary pixels. It allowed dismemberment, decapitation and all other manner of murder that seems tame by today’s standards, but was extremely controversial at the time.
Mortal Kombat was blamed for more than one violent crime over the years, killers supposedly taking “inspiration” from the game, including one teen who was jailed for 36 years in 2008 for killing a seven year old allegedly using moves from the game. MK has often been a target of video game violence protestors both in the public eye and even in Congress, yet the franchise endures as the US has grown more accustomed to media violence in every form.
Though Midway owned the game through 2009, they eventually collapsed and the series moved to Warner Bros. that year. Since then, many more games in the franchise have been produced, including the ultra-reboot from a few years back, simply titled “Mortal Kombat.” It was a surprisingly refreshing return to the roots of the series, infusing old school movesets with new-generation graphics. Mortal Kombat X promises even more of an evolution, citing “cinematic combat” as a goal. Both games have upgraded their level of violence to include X-ray moves which show exactly which bones are breaking and which organs are rupturing during fights. There isn’t much else like it in the scene.
Fighting games are not quite the massive draws they used to be in the age of sandbox games like Grand Theft Auto, first person shooters like Call of Duty or “Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas” like League of Legends. The fighting genre mostly caters to a niche of the devoted, but most of Mortal Kombat’s competition in the space is still around, from Street Fighter to Tekken to Soul Caliber. But no one does brutal violence quite like them.
It seems Mortal Kombat will be around for quite some time to come, with new games and probable film reboots on the horizon. It’s one of gaming’s most storied franchises, and has miraculously both stayed true to its roots while evolving for new generations of gamers, no easy feat. Expect to see MK exist for decades to come.
[Photo via Warner Bros]
