Button Mashing Led Me Down an Unexpected Path

By the time I caught up with all the gaming history that I needed to know, I was approximately 40 years old and I had been playing retro games for nearly a year. I had played the majority of the classics recommended to me by my daughter. However, I had always stayed away from fighting games. I simply thought they were… I don’t know, just too complex; too social; too dependent on the quick reflexes I didn’t believe I possessed at my age.

My daughter had brought out Mortal Kombat for the SNES, the original Mortal Kombat, released in ’92, and she told me I had to experience what she called “the first true controversy in gaming”. She fired up the SNES in my living room while I sat there with a cold beer after having had the worst day I’ve ever had on a job site, due to a failed concrete pour. “You totally missed the boat on the whole moral panic thing”, she said. “Congress literally held hearings on this game”.

First, my initial reaction was honestly — disappointment. The graphics were older than anything I had become familiar with in the retro games I had started to enjoy. The characters did not appear like the bright, happy cartoons I was getting used to in other classic games. They appeared like… photos that had been cut apart and put back together again, which I later learned that’s basically what they were. They were stiff. Unrealistic. The animation felt unnatural, as opposed to the fluid animation I had grown accustomed to in other games from the same era.

“Give it a try,” my daughter urged, handing me the controller. “Play Sub-Zero – he’s the blue ninja.”

I muddled my way through the character select menu and accidentally selected the wrong character. That character was Scorpion, the yellow ninja. The match started, and I was killing myself with the computer controlled player instantly. The button mashing wasn’t helping; I was missing attacks, and getting counter attacked and losing health quickly. This was nothing like the platformer-style games I had been playing. Those games I could usually push through with sheer force of will.

“You have to block,” my daughter told me, leaning in to help me. “Pull back on the joystick. And special moves require different buttons, button combinations like Street Fighter.”

Street Fighter?! I had no idea what that was, and I wasn’t certain I even cared at the time. But she helped guide me through Scorpion’s spear move — “Get over here!” — which involved pressing back twice, then the low punch button. It took me probably 15 attempts to master the timing, but when that yellow rope flew across the screen and yanked my opponent toward me, something shifted. Not mechanically, but philosophically. This was not about running and jumping through levels and picking up coins. This was about learning a new language of input and timing, about analyzing your opponent and responding appropriately.

The violence, or gore, whatever term you prefer, was…well, it was certainly the focal point, wasn’t it? My daughter filled me in on the whole controversy while I continued to lose. About the parents’ groups freaking out about the gore, about Nintendo censoring their version by turning the blood grey and referring to it as “sweat”, about Sega gaining market share by leaving the gore intact and utilizing a special code. As a construction worker, I’d seen real blood in my life, and the pixelated red splatters seemed almost cartoonish. But I could see why it would have been considered outrageous at the time.

What drew me into the game was not the gore itself, but the precision required to pull off special moves and fatalities. My daughter taught me Sub-Zero’s spinal-rip finishing move, listing off the button combo like it was a phone number. Back, back, down, forward, low punch. Had to enter it exactly when the game said “Finish Him!”, or nothing would happen. If you enter the button combo too early or too late, you’ll just throw a normal punch.

Spent the next three hours perfecting that one finishing move. Three hours. My daughter had long since lost interest and had abandoned me to scroll through her phone, but I was consumed by getting the timing right. When I finally successfully executed it — watching Sub-Zero rip his opponent’s head off, with the spine dangling loose — I felt a strange mixture of pride and disgust. Pride won.

After my daughter left, I started researching the game and subsequently discovered a rabbit hole of information about the early days of the fighting game scene. The arcade culture of the early ‘90s was fascinating to me and completely foreign to my experiences. Youngsters congregating around arcade machines, exchanging techniques, establishing local hierarchies of skill. The social aspects that I had missed by not growing up gaming. Reading about players who had memorized frame data and optimized combos, I realised just how deep these games were — seemingly simple games.

I purchased my own copy of the game soon after, along with a Genesis, so I could play the uncensored version of the game, with the blood code. A-B-A-C-A-B-B. Felt slightly foolish entering a cheat code to allow for violence at my age, but as a historian, I wanted to experience the game as it was originally intended. The blood did make a big difference, to be honest. Not because I specifically enjoyed the gore, but because the censored version of the game felt sterilized in a way that removed from the overall aesthetic of the game.

Digitized actors gave Mortal Kombat a vastly different feel than the other fighting games I played afterward. When I eventually played Street Fighter II, the hand-drawn animation felt smoother and more natural, but less… substantial? The Mortal Kombat characters moved like real people, bound by real physical laws, even if those laws were greatly exaggerated. Johnny Cage moved like a real martial artist, because he was one — an actor named Daniel Pesina who performed the moves in front of a camera.

Learning about the development of the game increased my admiration of the technological achievements of the game. This was 1992 — creating a digitized actor and integrating him into a game character was cutting-edge technology. The stiff animation that initially repelled me, was in fact the result of the developers pushing the limits of the hardware to create something that shouldn’t have been possible.

Each character in the game felt distinct to play, not just visually, but mechanically. Sub-Zero’s ice ball allowed him to freeze his opponents, allowing him time to formulate a strategy. Scorpion’s spear could drag an opponent from across the screen to him. Johnny Cage’s shadow kick allowed him to rapidly close the distance. These were not just different animations for the same moveset, they were fundamentally different approaches to movement and spatial manipulation within a match.

Fatuities were clearly the biggest draw for most players, but they also fulfilled a mechanical purpose. For a successful fatality, you must demonstrate mastery of your character’s input while under pressure. Miss the timing or mess up the button combination, and you’ll look like a fool. Pull it off, and you’ve proven your capacity to control the situation to every spectator. In the arcade environment where the game was designed, that was significant.

I started to realise why the panic over the game had been so intense. This was not violence for violence’s sake, this was violence as a means of display, violence as a measure of skill, violence as social currency. The game encouraged you to not just defeat your opponent, but to do so in the most theatrical and gory fashion as possible. To parents who viewed games as mere toys for their children, that would have been shocking.

The rumors of the hidden characters fascinated me from a historical perspective. The legend of the early days of arcades was passed down among players like folklore. Players claimed that Reptile (a green palette swap of the ninja characters) existed, and that other secret characters existed, but never actually did. The combined imagination of the arcade community generated myths and legends about the games that were almost more captivating than the games themselves.

I spent many hours researching to prove that the nonexistent secret characters were real. Entering button combinations after the game ends, entering cheats before the game starts, attempting to fight in specific stages under specific conditions. The time and energy devoted to finding evidence of the nonexistent secret characters reminded me of conspiracy theorists, except the stakes were purely about entertainment, as opposed to a worldview. We wanted the game to be more mystical than it actually was.

The evolution of Mortal Kombat to its sequels displayed a series trying to capitalize on its own success. MK2 added additional characters and additional elaborate fatalities, and also introduced Babalities and Friendships — finishing moves that transform your opponent into a baby, or cause your character to behave in a silly way, as opposed to violently. It was the developers acknowledging that the violence had become almost parody, yet still meeting the fans’ expectations.

Once I completed the classic series, I could see that each entry was attempting to surpass the previous entry in terms of shock value, and build upon a larger mythos. Ancient tournaments, invading worlds, elder gods — what had begun as a straightforward fighting game with digitized actors had evolved into this massive scale fantasy world. The story was absurd, but absurd in such a way that it felt believable.

I had not grown up gaming, thus I experienced the games in a different light than younger gamers did. The violence that had seemed so transgressive in 1992 now seems quaint in comparison. But the level of accuracy that was required to achieve special moves and fatalities still felt rewarding. The game had a strong foundation of mechanics that endured the test of time, regardless of whether the gore still shocked.

However, the influence on popular culture was undeniable. Mortal Kombat had instigated a debate regarding the suitability of mature content in games, resulting in the establishment of the ESRB rating system we utilize today. It had proven that games could target adult audiences, and elicit mainstream controversy. It had pushed the boundaries of what was technologically feasible in terms of digitized graphics and photorealistic violence.

Most importantly, the game had acted as a coming-of-age ritual for a generation of gamers. Reading forum posts and reading about the early days of Mortal Kombat, I continuously observed the same themes — kids snuck quarters to play the uncensored arcade version, committed to memory fatality button combinations as if they were sacred texts, argued with their parents regarding the morality of the game. To kids who grew up with the game, Mortal Kombat represented rebellion, maturity, forbidden knowledge.

I missed that generational experience entirely, but I can still perceive the significance of the game. It had expanded the vocabulary of gaming, challenged the cultural boundaries, and demonstrated that interactive entertainment could spark controversy in meaningful ways. Not bad for a simple tournament fighting game with stiff animation and pixelated blood.

Still has that Genesis copy on my shelf, right next to Street Fighter II and Fatal Fury. Different interpretations of the same basic premise, each one teaching me a little bit about how to design games, and a little bit about the cultural context surrounding them. Not bad for a construction worker who thought fighting games were too difficult for someone of his age.