In 1992 and 1993, we’ve seen the chart topped by Japanese and British efforts at the new, improved style of one-on-one fighting game. Here’s an American effort, another part of the wave of American games beginning to crop up in our story across formats. It’s safe to say it’s better remembered than Body Blows, and in this case there’s a good reason for that beyond who won unrelated battles and wrote the history.
One key difference from Body Blows is that while Mortal Kombat shares a basic design with Street Fighter II, it finds a lot more different ways to differentiate itself. Its aesthetic is a particularly long way from Street Fighter II, replacing comic book extravagance with grit and grime. Its characters are real actors represented via grainy video capture, which lends them a spooky wrongness that was surely already there when the game was released but has grown with the technology’s obsolescence. The people feel like they’ve been captured by a screen and forced into these roles. Sent to a dimension beyond their comprehension, it’s easy to imagine their agony as their thoughts are ripped apart and all their memories fade to nothing, their very existences absorbed by the algorithm of video kompression.
With their identity thus compromised, it makes some sense that fighters are less distinct from each other. They all get the same basic moves, with limited special moves which are simple and memorable, the more so for being nicely themed. Sub-Zero freezing opponents, Raiden’s lightning moves, and… okay, not everyone is as obvious. When it comes to facing off against each other, fights are nasty, brutish and short. Simple moves take away vast chunks of fighters’ energy bars, and you don’t get much chance to think about how shallow it all is. As a quick play, Mortal Kombat is an attractive option, especially in single player. In place of complexity within the fight itself, of course, you get complex cheats and a complex sequence of commands to pull off unnecessary fatalities, the ingenious, inglorious USP of the game. After already beating your opponent, why not burn them to crisp or rip their head and spine off!
The removal of heads makes clear the real genesis of Mortal Kombat, if the demon pits and the style of fighting haven’t made it clear enough. It never had any chance of being a real alternative to Street Fighter II, but beneath the surface it isn’t even trying. Wielding simplicity as a virtue, it’s not something new, but a revival of the old tradition: Barbarian with a modern veneer. It’s shallow, it’s desperate, but on those terms it’s a big success.
One obvious difference from Barbarian is that there’s no Maria Whittaker on the cover, or in the game, this game being the product of an America where anything relating to sex would be taking things way further beyond acceptability than extreme violence. The obligatory one female competitor of eight (Mortal Kombat also features a 1:3 female:palette-swapped-male-ninja ratio), Sonya, is less male gaze-y than Chun-Li or especially Body Blows’s Maria, too. She is a pleasant oddity among an odd line-up.
Another difference from Barbarian, but not from many, many of its contemporaries, is the Orientalism. It was really striking on replaying, because I remembered the ugliness and the violence of Mortal Kombat, but I didn’t remember the all-purpose Asianness. When I first saw them as a child I probably couldn’t have told you where Street Fighter II or Mortal Kombat was made, mind. Now, I can’t miss the invocations of shaolin mysticism, the hodgepodge of temple imagery turned evil in the background, the horrible chintzy faux-Eastern music. For all Mortal Kombat’s brutal successes, that’s what they have to be weighed against. Scraping a little from the surface of real people’s culture and using it as if it exists just to support your edgy aesthetic is a worse violence than any depiction of beheading that looks no more realistic than the Spectrum could manage.
Mega Drive chart, Edge 003, January 1994