It is hard to put into words exactly how I reacted the first time I threw a punch in a video game, that actually hit something that resembled a human being. I know this will sound insane now, but that is how I remembered it.
At forty-one years old, I had been studying the history of gaming for approximately one year. During that time I went through all of the classic games that my daughter recommended I cheque out, but I had avoided fighting games. I didn’t want to try to learn the complexities of fighting games. I did not want to get into the social aspect of fighting games, and I figured I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the fast-paced nature of fighting games at my age.
My daughter brought home Mortal Kombat for the Super Nintendo (the original that was released in 1992). She said I had to experience “Gaming’s First Real Controversy”. She plugged it into my Super Nintendo in my living room while I sat there nursing a cold beer and trying to recover from a terrible day caused by a failed concrete pour. “You missed all the moral panic that surrounded this game when it was first released,” she said. “They even had Congressional hearings over this game.”
I was slightly disappointed. Although I was starting to enjoy some of the retro graphics in the classic games I was playing, I thought the fighters in Mortal Kombat looked stiff and awkward, as if they were merely photographs that had been broken apart and reassembled. The fighters’ movements and actions in the game looked clumsy and unnatural compared to other games that were produced during the same time period.
“Try it,” my daughter said handing me the controller. “Play as Sub-Zero. He is the blue ninja.”
I fumbled through the character select menu and inadvertently chose Scorpion, the yellow ninja. The game started and I was immediately getting destroyed by the computer-controlled opponent. No matter how many times I tried to strike the opponent with the attack buttons, I was always countered and lost health rapidly. Fighting games were nothing like the platformers I had become accustomed to, where simply stumbling through a level was usually enough to complete it.
“You need to block,” my daughter said, taking control of the controller to demonstrate to me. “Pull the joystick back. Special moves are entered via button combinations, not by moving the joystick like in Street Fighter.”
Street Fighter? I had never even heard of it. But she walked me through the spear move for Scorpion, “Get over here!”, which required pressing the back button twice, followed by the low punch button. I think it took me nearly fifteen attempts to get the timing correct, but when the yellow rope shot across the screen and pulled the opponent toward me, something clicked. Not just physically, but intellectually. This was not about jumping and running on platforms or collecting coins. This was about learning a new vocabulary of inputs and timing, learning to read your opponent, and react to them.
Clearly, the violence was… well, clearly the violence was the whole point of it. My daughter explained to me about the controversy surrounding the violence during the gameplay, explaining how the parent groups had freaked out about the blood and gore, how Nintendo had censored their version of the game by altering the colour of the blood to “sweat”, and how Sega had capitalized on the controversy by producing an unedited version of the game with a special code. As someone who works as a construction worker and has seen quite a bit of real blood from work-related injuries, the pixelated red blood drops appeared almost cartoonish to me. However, I could see why the violence may have seemed shocking in context.
Not only was the gore a big part of the draw for many gamers, but I was drawn in by the precision required to achieve the special moves and fatalities. My daughter showed me Sub-Zero’s spine-rip finishing move and rattled off the button combination as if it were a phone number. Back, back, down, forward, low punch. If you performed the button combination correctly at the exact right time (after hearing “Finish Him!”) the finishing move would be completed properly. If you performed it incorrectly, it would simply throw a normal punch.
I practiced that single finishing move for the next three hours. Three hours. My daughter had long since lost interest and was scrolling through her phone, but I was hooked on perfecting the timing of the finisher. When I finally accomplished executing it (seeing Sub-Zero rip the opponent’s head from his body with the spine trailing behind), I experienced a strange mix of satisfaction and revulsion. Satisfaction won out.
Once she left, I started researching the game online, and that lead me down a rabbit hole regarding the early days of the fighting game genre. The early arcade culture surrounding the games of the early 1990s was fascinating to me, because it was completely foreign to anything I had ever experienced. People gathered around the machines, traded techniques, established local hierarchies based on skill. The social aspects of gaming that I had missed out on by not growing up as a gamer. Reading about players who had memorized frame data and developed optimal combos for the game made me realise just how deep games such as Mortal Kombat truly were.
I bought my own copy of Mortal Kombat within the week, as well as a Sega Genesis so that I could play the uncensored version of the game with the blood code. Entering a cheat code to allow violence at my age felt a little silly, but the historian in me wanted to experience the game as it was originally intended. The blood definitely made a difference. Not because I enjoyed the gore, but because the censored version of the game felt sanitized in a way that detracted from the overall aesthetic of the game.
The digitized actors of Mortal Kombat gave a completely different feel to other fighting games I played after that. When I eventually acquired Street Fighter II, the hand-drawn animation of the characters felt more fluid and natural, but less… substantial? The Mortal Kombat characters moved as if they were actual people with physics, albeit the physics were exaggerated. Johnny Cage looked like a real martial artist because he was a real martial artist — an actor named Daniel Pesina who had been photographed performing the moves.
Understanding how the game was developed, and the technology used to produce it, further enhanced my appreciation of the technical achievements made. It was 1992 – the technology to digitize real actors and include them as game characters was cutting-edge. The stiff animation that I had initially found unappealing was directly a result of pushing hardware boundaries to create something that should not have existed. Just like we solve engineering problems in construction – we use the resources we have to create something that should not be possible.
Every character played in a different manner, not just visually, but mechanically. Sub-Zero’s ice ball could freeze opponents, allowing the player time to develop a plan. Scorpion’s spear could pull opponents toward him from anywhere on the screen. Johnny Cage had a shadow kick that allowed him to travel large distances quickly. These were not simply different animations on the same general move-set, these were entirely different approaches to controlling space and time in a fight.
Even though the fatalities were obviously the primary attraction for most players, they also served a mechanical purpose. In order to successfully perform a fatality, the player had to master the timing of the special move, while under intense pressure. Miss the timing or enter the wrong button combination and you’d look stupid. Enter the right combination at the correct time and you would demonstrate yourself to any bystanders. In the arcade environment the game was built for, demonstrating your ability to successfully land a fatality was a form of social validation.
As I continued to understand why the game had generated such a firestorm of controversy, I realised it was not the violence for the sake of violence, it was the violence as a spectacle, the violence as a demonstration of skill, the violence as social currency. The game encouraged you to not only beat your opponent, but to do so as violently and dramatically as possible. For parents who saw games as children’s toys, that would have been scary.
Reading about the rumors of the hidden characters that allegedly existed in the game was fascinating to me from a historical standpoint. In the pre-internet era, arcade legends were spread from person to person like folklore. Reptile was real – a green palette swap of the ninja characters that could only appear under certain conditions. However, players swore they had seen other, nonexistent, secret characters. The collective imagination of the arcade community had created mythologies around these games that were almost more interesting than the games themselves.
I wasted way too much time attempting to verify the existence of the nonexistent characters. Trying to input specific button combinations while holding random buttons, trying to enter intricate combinations at the title screen, trying to fight in specific locations while fulfilling specific criteria. The passion to find secrets that did not exist reminded me of conspiracy theorists, but the stakes were not the legitimacy of a world view, but enjoyment. We wanted the game to be more mysterious than it was.
Mortal Kombat and its subsequent sequels demonstrated a series that was attempting to contain its own success. MK2 added additional characters and additional fatality options, as well as introduced Babalities and Friendships – finishing moves that transform your opponent into a baby or cause your character to do something humorous, as opposed to violent. It was the developers recognising that the violence had become almost parody, while still wanting to provide what fans expected.
By the time I finished the entire series of classic Mortal Kombat games, I could see how each successive game had attempted to exceed the previous game’s shock factor, while developing an increasingly complex mythology. Ancient tournaments, invaded realms, and elder gods – what was once a simple fighting game with digitized actors had evolved into a grandiose fantasy world. The plot was absurd, but absurdity can be effective if the story is committed to absurdity in a logical manner.
Playing these games without the benefit of nostalgia for childhood experiences provided me with a unique understanding of the enduring effects of Mortal Kombat. While the violence that seemed so outrageous in 1992 seems almost quaint by today’s standards, the precision required to execute the special moves and fatalities still felt rewarding. The game was built on a solid mechanical foundation that was unaffected by whether the gore was still shocking.
However, the cultural effect was undeniable. Mortal Kombat had initiated a debate about acceptable content for minors in games that ultimately led to the establishment of the ESRB rating system currently in use. It had proven that games could be marketed to adults and generate mainstream controversy. It had pushed the limits of technology and inspired many developers to explore digitized graphics and realistic violence.
What struck me the most, however, was how the game served as a rite of passage for a generation of gamers. In the forums and retrospective articles I read, I continually encountered the same themes – kids stealing quarters to play the uncensored arcade version, memorizing fatality button combinations as a form of sacred knowledge, and defending the game against parental criticism. For those who had discovered it at the right age, Mortal Kombat was a symbol of rebellion, maturity, and forbidden knowledge.
I missed out on the experience of discovering the game in my youth, but I could still appreciate what the game had accomplished. Mortal Kombat had broadened the vocabulary of the medium, challenged cultural norms, and illustrated that interactive entertainment could be genuinely provocative in meaningful ways. Not bad for a tournament fighting game with stiff animation and pixelated blood.
David runs a pub in Bristol and has transformed his back room into a functional shrine to arcade cabinets and early home systems. By night he writes about arcade culture, MAME emulation ethics, and why certain games simply feel different on original hardware versus emulation. He brings a perspective that matters: he owns these machines, maintains them, and plays them regularly, rather than just holding memories of them. His technical knowledge of arcade hardware is matched only by his ability to explain why authenticity genuinely matters to the experience.
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