Mortal Kombat (Arcade) Midway
In 1991, Street Fighter II stormed the arcade scene mercilessly, breathing new life into an industry over a decade old, and sending hordes of kids and teens popping quarters into Capcom's machines. The game's simplicity and depth kept players coming back, and the other big arcade companies instantly began to mimic its successful formula with limited success. Some games, like Samurai Shodown II, brought something new to the table and gained dedicated fans, but didn't manage to break into the big time. Most merely stank. Midway entered the fray with Mortal Kombat -- its incredibly different take on the burgeoning genre proved refreshing to gamers, and its over-the-top gore made it instantly notorious with kids who wanted a walk on the wild side.
Get over here!
The game was an instant hit. Digitized graphics of real people replaced the hand-drawn characters Street Fighter II favored, and the game's fatality system -- which let gamers violently execute fallen competitors -- was a great hook to get kids to flock to machines. The resulting media notoriety didn't hurt, either. Problem is, the game couldn't really hold a candle to Street Fighter II from a gameplay perspective. It looked flashy, but it was unresponsive and poorly balanced. To say that it was hard to get a handle on its controls is an understatement. Fans persevered, but its popularity was driven more by infamy than quality.
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ferricide: I never got swept up into the whole MK thing for very long. I played the first game in arcades -- my character was Raiden -- but it was pretty clear to me that once you wiped away the buckets of blood that the game didn't have a heck of a lot going for it. Most fans still point to MKII as the pinnacle of the series, and I'll admit that Midway refined the formula significantly for that one. As for the third and fourth games -- the less said about them, the better. At any rate, I maintain that MK was nothing more than a flash in the pan that got marketed into a frenzy. The first game deserves to be alongside Time Killers in the annals of arcade history, not mentioned in the same breath as Capcom's hallowed fighting series.
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hardcore_pawn: I have a distinct dislike for the original Mortal Kombat. How can crappy pixilated graphics and violence have given this sub-standard fighting game the same levels of acclaim as Capcom's excellent Street Fighter II? It's madness I tell you! I can understand the "coolness" factor of executing fatality moves thereby humiliating opponents with style in a public forum, but does anyone else understand that the fighting system was severely limited? I mean, the only thing worse than MK that I can think of at the time was Pit-Fighter, which also featured poor digitized fighters battling in head-to-head combat.
Maybe it boils down to a difference between U.S.-developed fighting games and Japanese-developing games of the same genre. Whatever the reason, I really don't understand what gamers found so amazing about Mortal Kombat. That's not to say that I dislike the series as whole -- MKII was pretty sweet on Genesis and SNES for sure -- but there's really little comparison between Midway's efforts and Capcom's kind of the arcades. Ryu and Ken might not be able to rip out a spleen at the end of a round, but they had something else to keep them busy -- and that, my friends, is gameplay.
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Delsyn: And, let's not forget the graphics and animation which were pretty poor even for that time. The level of animation in the game is about one step above the cardboard cutouts on South Park, and the flying drops of blood that cover the screen during a fatality move are so poorly done it's amazing that anyone would think this stuff is "outrageous." If you get the chance, play MKI, Street Fighter II, and MKII in that order and check out the difference in range of motion and moves available. It's an eye-opening experience!
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