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Mortal Kombat

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This article concerns the fighting game series and media tie-ins. For the first entry in the series, see Mortal Kombat (video game). For the movie based on the series, see Mortal Kombat (film).

Mortal Kombat (commonly abbreviated MK) is a popular series of fighting games created by Midway. It is especially noted for its digitized sprites (which differentiated it from its contemporaries' hand-drawn sprites), and its mix of bloody and brutal action; its graphic fatality killing moves led to the founding of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB).

Mortal Kombat logo
Mortal Kombat logo

Overview

The original Mortal Kombat was developed as a reaction to the popular Capcom fighting game Street Fighter II, with simpler controls and digitized graphics. Some say the game's graphic violence was gratuitous, and was only included in order to generate a public outcry and controversy that would garner publicity for the game. Although highly controversial, the mix of realism and violence propelled Mortal Kombat to widespread and historic renown.

Throughout the series, the game was noted for its simplicity of controls and the exotic special moves it featured, as well as a tendency to replace a hard c sound in its lexicon with a k - hence the name Mortal Kombat.

Legacy

Midway created five sequels for the arcade and home systems, each one bloodier, more brutal, and stranger than the last. Mortal Kombat 4 brought the series into 3D, replacing the digitized fighters of the previous games with polygon models, while Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance was the first in the series to skip arcades altogether and go directly to consoles, a symptom of U.S. arcade market's dramatic decline. The second-to-last installment in the series, Mortal Kombat: Deception, was released for the Xbox and PlayStation 2 platforms in October 2004 (with a Nintendo GameCube version released in February 2005). Following a gameplay style very similar to the one found on Deadly Alliance, Deception also features several new gaming modes, such as a Puzzle Fighter-like puzzle game, an Archon-like chess game, and an RPG-style quest mode, as well as a suicidal finishing move for each character, usually performed to prevent the opponent from doing a fatality. A Sony PSP version of Deception (named Mortal Kombat: Unchained) has also been announced, while a future release, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, will wrap up the current story continuity and feature almost all the characters that have appeared in the series.

Finishing moves in later games included the Animality (turning into animal to violently finish off the opponent), the Brutality (decimating an opponent into pieces with a long combination of hits or combo), the Friendship (offering one's opponent a token of friendship), and the Babality (transforming the opponent into a baby). The Babality and Friendship moves were created as a jokey non-violent finishing move, a swipe at the US Congressional Investigation for Violence in Videogames who came down harshly on the Mortal Kombat games. Purists, fonder of the earlier style, were upset by the introduction of such finishing moves, yet Mortal Kombat's "purely violent" and dark gameplay was once again implemented after the release of Mortal Kombat 4.

Games in series

Fighting games

Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks (2005) is the latest game in the series.

Non-fighting games

Easter eggs and secrets

Mortal Kombat was among the first titles in the fighting game genre to include secret characters, secret games, and other Easter eggs. Mortal Kombat 3, for example, included a hidden game of Galaxian. Many extras in the series have only been accessible through very challenging, demanding, and sometimes coincidental requirements. In the 1992 original, by executing a Fatality when fighting on The Pit stage (the bridge) without taking any damage or pressing the block button in the winning round, the player could fight Reptile, a merge between the Sub-Zero and Scorpion characters... provided that you obtained a double flawless and never hit block during the fight (due to Sonya's fatality combination including the block button, she was allowed to face Reptile on the home ports). In Mortal Kombat II, Reptile would be developed into a full character with his own special moves and would be available from the outset. The Sega Genesis games had some unique eggs: in one, a headshot of President of Probe Software Fergus McGovern flew in front of the moon in Mortal Kombat's Pit stage, while in a second, Raiden could perform a "Fergality" by pressing Back, Back, Back, Block during a fatality on the Armory stage. It was pioneering ideas like these that has made Mortal Kombat one of the most memorable of the genre.

Another Easter egg actually came about from a rumored glitch. In the original arcade version of the first Mortal Kombat, a rumor stated that the game would sometimes present problems due to a bug and mix two characters together. This would usually be two of the ninja characters, resulting in a ninja in a semi-red suit. The computer would display his name as "ERMAC", short for "error macro." As word spread, people thought they had found a secret character. In the game audits, ERMACS will appear on one of the pages, possibly being a stat to either show how many times a player encountered a secret character or a glitch. That wasn't the case, yet in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, it was decided to make an actual Ermac character. Also, glitch characters occurred should the player accomplish the very difficult feat of reaching Reptile in Endurance mode. Once Reptile was defeated, the second character would jump down. As Reptile used a special green colour palette, the following fighter (a normal fighter) would be a jumble of the character's original colors plus Reptile's green colors.

However, one of the most fascinating elements of Mortal Kombat was completely unplanned and out of the programmers' hands. Following the release of Mortal Kombat II, a myth culture was created around the game. The most famous one is the Goro myth. In the first game, Goro was a four-armed monster that acted as a miniboss to the game's main boss, Shang Tsung. Many fans were convinced that Goro was hidden somewhere in Mortal Kombat II and many were obsessed with finding him. Alas, these rumors were later confirmed as untrue.

Some Easter eggs originated from private jokes between members of the Mortal Kombat development team. The best-known example is "Toasty," which began in Mortal Kombat II. Developers fell into the habit of yelling the victory cry "Toasted!" (and later, "Toasty!") during the testing phase of development. This joke found its way into the game in the form of a small image of sound designer Dan Forden, who would appear in the corner of the screen during gameplay and sing the word "toasty." Later games included other jokes that originated in similar fashion; Mortal Kombat IV had characters uttering strange battle cries such as "That's nacho cheese!" or "I'm gonna throw you over there". "Toasty" is also found in Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks after pulling off a chain of hits and will appear randomly, but the picture of Dan Forden will not appear. Pressing the start button during the "Toasty" will also result in the player recieving an experience points bonus.

Bosses and sub-bosses

Mortal Kombat featured two bosses. One was a sub-boss (whom you'd have to face before challenging the main boss of the game). The sub-boss of the game was a four armed Shokan warrior named Goro. Upon Goro's defeat, the player faced the game's main boss, Shang Tsung.

Future Mortal Kombat sequels would continue to use sub-bosses. While most sub-bosses were unplayable monsters like another Shokan, a Centaur or an Oni, Mortal Kombat: Deception broke this trend by placing the character Noob Smoke as a sub-boss, and the traditional "non-playable monster" was Onaga, the game's boss character.

Here is the list of bosses and sub-bosses for the Mortal Kombat series:

  • Goro - sub-boss: MK1, MKT, MK4 boss: MK:SM
  • Shang Tsung - boss: MK1; sub-boss: MKII & MK:SMsub-boss or boss(It's random to whether Shang Tsung or Quan Chi comes first.)MK:DA
  • Kintaro - sub-boss: MK2, MK:SM, MKT
  • Shao Kahn - boss: MK:SM, MK2, MK3, UMK3, MKT,
  • Motaro - sub-boss: MK3, UMK3, MKT
  • Kano - boss: MK:SF
  • Shinnok - boss: MKM:SZ, MK4
  • Moloch - sub-boss: MK:DA
  • Quan Chi - sub-boss: MKM:SZ (When played in a 2-on-2 game, he is the boss alongside Shinnok): MK4; boss or sub-boss (It's random to whether Shang Tsung or Quan Chi comes first.): MK:DA;
  • Noob-Smoke - sub-boss: MK:D
  • Onaga - boss: MK:D
  • Mabus - sub-boss: MK:A
  • Blaze - boss: MK:A

Contributing cultural material

The Mortal Kombat mythology borrows heavily from multiple sources, primarily (but not limited to) Asian cultures, religions and martial arts. Examples include the following:

  • Raiden, who is the God of Thunder in Mortal Kombat, takes his name from the Japanese Raiden (meaning "thunder and lightning"), which is the name of a demon-god in Japanese mythology. The Japanese Raiden is usually depicted as a man-beast with sharp teeth, long hair and a large drum for making thunder. The Mortal Kombat Raiden's trademark glowing eyes and straw hat, however, appear to have been inspired by the Three Storms in the film Big Trouble in Little China. In the European release, his name was changed to Rayden due to offended publicans of the same name who didn't want their name associated with the "Violent Video Game"
  • Fujin (Mortal Kombat 4) is named after the Japanese wind god Fuujin.
  • Other characters have no direct counterparts in mythology, though their names are derived from Asiatic languages:
    • Shujinko (Mortal Kombat: Deception) is from the Japanese shujinkou (meaning "protagonist").
    • Damashi (Mortal Kombat: Deception) is from the Japanese damashi (meaning "deception").
    • Hotaru (Mortal Kombat: Deception) is from the Japanese hotaru (meaning "firefly").
    • Kenshi (Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance and Mortal Kombat: Deception) is from the Japanese kenshi (meaning "swordsman").
  • The White Lotus Society to which Liu Kang belonged may or may not have been named after to the secret White Lotus Society which existed in China during the Yuan Dynasty and Ming Dynasty. A white lotus is traditionally symbolic of death.
  • The Lin Kuei ninja clan that Sub-Zero hails from is an allusion to the real-life myths of a Lin Kuei assassin guild in the mountains of China, who may or may not have been taught the ways of mysticism by mountain and forest spirits and demons such as the Tengu. Rumor has it that representatives of the historical Lin Kuei traveled to Japan to teach the locals the art of what would eventually be known as ninjutsu, a tale that is mimicked by Takeda's departure from the Mortal Kombat Lin Kuei to set up his own ninja clan in Japan, the Shirai Ryu.
  • Kano's Black Dragon clan may be based loosely on the historical Black Dragon Society.
  • Moloch shares his name with the ancient Middle Eastern deity Moloch
  • Shang Tsung as a name is an actual expression for "temple elder". Deriving this from the fact that chinese mysticism often entwined spirituality and magic, this may be a reference to Shang Tsung's actual call as a sorcerer.

Movies and television

Mortal Kombat was adapted into two major motion pictures, Mortal Kombat, and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. Both had a poor critical reception at the time they were released, but the first movie was a major financial success, eventually grossing over $125,000,000 worldwide and starting the Hollywood careers of Paul W. S. Anderson, Robin Shou, and Talisa Soto, among others. Although it is very unlikely, a third movie, Mortal Kombat: Devastation, is said to be in pre-production as confirmed officially, and may be released by the end of 2007.

The franchise also sparked two TV series, the animated series Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the Realm and the live-action Mortal Kombat: Conquest. Neither series ran for more than one season despite the popularity of Conquest. In 1995, an animated prequel to the first movie, titled Mortal Kombat: The Journey Begins, was released on home video.

Plot continuity

Every single game in the Mortal Kombat series features a different ending for every character. Because many endings in a single game will contradict each other, only one or a few per game are considered canon, and the true endings are never known until the next game is released. The result is that when a new Mortal Kombat game is released, fans speculate about which ending (or endings) are real.

Nearly every game's canon ending involves the good guys emerging triumphant over evil, though this trend was broken with the release of Mortal Kombat: Deception, which revealed that Earthrealm's warriors in Deadly Alliance had failed to prevent Shang Tsung and Quan Chi from resurrecting the Dragon King's army.

Mortal Kombat crossovers

Characters from the Mortal Kombat series have sometimes appeared in other video games as secret characters, particularly other Midway games. Examples of this include:

  • Raiden had a cameo appearance in a pinball machine, Bally's 1994 World Cup Championship, in a bonus round.
  • Raiden, Reptile and Sub-Zero appeared as playable characters in early versions of NBA Jam [1]
  • Raiden appeared as an unlockable character in Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict (which coincidentally also included a fatality system similar to MK's). Shao Kahn's voice is also an alternate to the default announcer.
  • Sub-Zero and Scorpion both appear as secret characters in MLB Slugfest 20-04.

Mortal Kombat has also been the focus of several extremely popular game modifications, including hacks to the original Mortal Kombat PC games (MK2: Kintaro's Vulgar Version), and the integration of console artwork and audio into other game engines, including but not limited to the original Quake and Unreal engines (Mortal Kombat Quake TC).

A fanmade version of Pong based on the Mortal Kombat series called Pong Kombat was released in 1994.

The Mortal Kombat characters are also featured in the trading card game Epic Battles which pits them against the Street Fighter characters (as well as upcoming characters from other fighting games). In addition to the current Epic Battles game, there was also an earlier trading card version of Mortal Kombat produced by Brady Games.

Similar games

  • Primal Rage featured a battle system similar to that found in Mortal Kombat, including fatality-like finishing moves and blood depiction. The major difference was that this game's characters were digitized, stop-motion animated dinosaurs and prehistoric apes puppets instead of digitized humans.
  • Killer Instinct, also produced by Midway, was also a fairly popular game that adopted a similar gameplay mechanism.
  • OpenMortal is a parody of Mortal Kombat, released for Windows and Linux under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It has 18 playable characters, with the possibility of adding designed characters, and can be played in team mode and network.
  • Time Killers was an arcade fighting game created during the success of Mortal Kombat by the game company known as Strata, featuring warriors from different time periods armed with a particular weapon. Unlike MK, however, it introduced 'Instant Kills' which could be done at any time the player desired and would immediately end a match if they hit successfully. Arms could also be hacked off with more damage.
  • Eternal Champions was an arcade-style fighting game released by Sega for the Sega Genesis, and re-released on the Sega CD. Though not necessarily a direct rip-off of Mortal Kombat, it was one of the first 2-D fighting games to include combos and incredibly gory fatalities, some of which totally out-do Mortal Kombat in the gore department (one such Fatality is the stage finisher in Dawson McShane's level, where a large wooden spike impales the losing character, resulting in gallons of blood and various intestines exploding from the fighter's torso.)
  • BloodStorm was another game created by the same team who developed Time Killers and featured the same gameplay and features, but with the addition of even managing to hack off an opponent's lower body and completely incapacitating them, as well as over-the-top violence, among other things. Ultimately fans considered it little more than a ripoff, and it ultimately flopped in the arcades.
  • Acclaim produced 2 Mortal Kombat-styled games based on the World Wrestling Federation: "WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game" & "WWF In Your House". Both featured Mortal Kombat-like sprites, moves, and finishers.
  • Way Of The Warrior: Way of the Warrrior was the tile of an ultra-violent fighting that featured digitized graphics of real fighters released for the 3DO CD-ROM system by Boston-based Naughty Dog.
  • Tattoo Assassins: Tattoo Assassins was a fighting game developed by Data East using the same digitized graphics style as Mortal Kombat. Most notable is that the game featured over 200 Fatalities, including Nudalities (only a rumor in Mortal Kombat) and Animalities (before they were featured in Mortal Kombat 3).
  • Street Fighter: The Movie (video game): The game used realistic, digitized graphics, trying to capitalize on the success of Mortal Kombat. Street Fighter: The Movie was co-developed by Capcom and Incredible Technologies and published by Capcom (in Japan) and Acclaim (in the US). It was poorly received by gamers and critics.
  • Blood Warrior: A Japanese fighting game featuring digitized graphics released in 1994 by Kaneko.[2]
  • Survival Arts: Yet another violent fighting game with digitized graphics and death finishing moves, this time created by Sammy. This video game was released in 1993 in order to cash in on the sucess of the Mortal Kombat series. [3]

See also

Wikiquote has quotations related to Mortal Kombat.

Official Websites:

Other Websites:

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