Unleashed in arcades, Street Fighter II practically printed money, almost single-handedly breathing new life into dingy strip mall arcades in the process. It upped the roster of playable characters from two to a perfectly balanced eight, added a bunch of special moves, and smoothed over the rougher parts of the gameplay. But it was its sequel, Street Fighter II, that polished the template until it shined. The first Street Fighter game, from 1987, helped carve out the bare bones of the modern fighting game. It’s impossible to discuss Mortal Kombat without also talking about Street Fighter II. Then at one point, somebody suggested, ‘Let’s make it gruesome.’ And everything just kind of built on that.” “We hated the idea of being the guy who’s dizzy, but it was great to be the guy who was walking up to go beat the crap out of him, so we moved that to the end of the fight where damage was already done. “Other fighting games had this thing where you would get dizzy, and the other guy would get dizzy, and you had to accept the fact that you were going to get hit,” said co-creator Ed Boon, quoted in Steve Kent’s The Ultimate History of Video Games. Incremental tweaks on the usual fighting game formula led to some big, loud changes.
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But the idea stuck around, and searching for a compelling new hook for a game, the team behind it stumbled upon the notion of going the exploitation movie route and swapping out star power for gory special effects. The impetus for the game came from a briefly considered video game vehicle for actor Jean-Claude Van Damme, which failed to materialize for all the non-artistic reasons that make such deals fall apart. In another life, Mortal Kombat - which turns 30 today - is part of a landfill of forgotten fighting game detritus from the early 1990s that desperately tried to pull bored teenagers back into arcades like a down-on-his-luck carnival barker. And shook up both the fighting game genre and the stuffy establishment in the process. “Gradually, then suddenly” may also describe how Mortal Kombat, a game with precisely nothing to do with Hemingway (although Motaro, the Centaurian sub-boss of the third game in the series, looks a little bit like a bull), came to exist.
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