Released in 1992 and is a fighting game developed and published by Midway. It is the first entry in the Mortal Kombat series and was subsequently released by Acclaim Entertainment for nearly every home platform at that time. The game focuses on several characters of various intentions who enter a martial arts tournament with worldly consequences. It introduced many key aspects of the Mortal Kombat series, including the unique five-button control scheme and gory finishing moves called Fatalities.
Mortal Kombat is considered by critics to be one of the greatest video games ever made. It spawned numerous sequels and spin-offs, beginning with Mortal Kombat II in 1993. Both games were the subject of a film adaptation in 1995. However, it also sparked much controversy for its depiction of extreme violence and gore using realistic digitized graphics and, along with the home releases of Night Trap and Lethal Enforcers, prompted the formation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), a U.S. government-backed organization that set descriptor ratings for video games. Mortal Kombat is a fighting game in which players battle opponents in one-on-one matches. The fighter that drains the opponent’s health bar first wins the round, and the first to win two rounds wins the match. Each round is timed; if both fighters still have health remaining when time runs out, the one with more health wins the round. Two players can start a game together, or a second player can join in during a single-player game to fight against them. If a game was in progress at the time, the winner continues it alone; if not, the winner begins a new game. Mortal Kombat uses an eight-directional joystick and five buttons, including two punch and two kick buttons, each further differentiated between high and low. Attacks can vary depending on the player’s distance from the opponent. All player characters have a shared set of attacks performed by holding the joystick in various directions, such as a leg sweep and an uppercut. The latter attack knocks the enemy high into the air and causes a large amount of damage. Most special moves were performed by tapping the joystick, sometimes ending with a button press. Unlike previous one-on-one fighting games, few moves require circular joystick movement. The game’s blocking system also distinguished itself from other fighting games, as characters take a small amount of damage from regular moves while blocking. However, the dedicated block button allows users to defend against attacks without retreating and blocking characters lose very little ground when struck, thus making counterattacks much easier after a successful block. Mortal Kombat further introduced the concept of “juggling”, knocking an opponent into the air and following up with a combination of attacks while the enemy is still airborne and defenceless. The idea became so popular that it has spread to many other games. Another of the game’s innovations was the Fatality, a finishing move performed against a defeated opponent to execute them in a gruesome fashion. In the single-player game, the player faces each of the seven playable characters in a series of one-on-one matches against computer-controlled opponents, ending in a “Mirror Match” against a duplicate of the player’s chosen character. The player must then fight in three endurance matches, each of which involves two opponents. As soon as the player defeats the first opponent, the second one enters the arena and the timer resets; however, the player’s health meter does not regenerate. After the third endurance match, the player fights the sub-boss Goro, followed by a final match against Shang Tsung. Between certain levels, players can compete in a minigame called “Test Your Might” for bonus points, breaking blocks of various materials by filling a meter past a certain point through rapid button presses. The first material the player must break is wood, followed by stone, steel, ruby, and finally diamond, with each successive material requiring more of the meter to be filled up and thus awarding more points. Two players can compete in the minigame at once and the last two materials are only accessible through two-player mode. The minigame returned in various forms in Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, Mortal Kombat: Komplete Edition, Mortal Kombat X, and its DLC counterpart, Mortal Kombat XL. The game takes place in Earth realm, where a tournament is being held on Shang Tsung’s Island, on which seven of its locations serve as stages in the game. The introduction to Mortal Kombat explains that Shang Tsung was banished to Earth realm 500 years ago and, with the help of the monstrous Goro, can seize control of the Mortal Kombat tournament in an attempt to doom the realm. For 500 years straight, Goro has been undefeated in the tournament and won nine consecutive tournaments. If Goro wins again, Shao Kahn, Emperor of Outworld, will be allowed to take Earth realm. To prevent this, a new generation of warriors must challenge Goro.
According to the Mortal Kombat series’ canon, Liu Kang won this tournament under Raiden’s guidance, defeating Goro and Shang Tsung and freeing the many souls that Tsung had imprisoned over the centuries. Scorpion pursues Sub-Zero and finally faces him after the end of the tournament, killing him and avenging his own death. Sonya rescues her special forces squad which had been held hostage by Shang Tsung. She fails to apprehend Kano, however, who escapes the island on a boat. The reptile, unsure of his fate, flees to the Outworld. Raiden then teleports the surviving Earthrealmers to safety as Shang Tsung’s island crumbles into the sea. Returning to Hollywood, Johnny Cage uses the experience to revive his failing acting career and develops a highly popular film franchise called Mortal Kombat. In Outworld, an outraged Shao Kahn refuses to accept the outcome of the tournament, setting up the events of the second game. The player receives information about the characters in biographies displayed during the attract mode. The bulk of the game’s backstory and lore was only told in a comic book, but some additional information about the characters and their motivations for entering the tournament is received upon completion of the game with each character. Mortal Kombat creators Ed Boon and John Tobias have stated that Midway Games tasked them with the project of developing a “combat game for release within a year”, which the two believed was intended to compete with the popular Street Fighter II. According to Tobias, he and Boon had envisioned a fighting game similar to Data East’s Karate Champ but featuring large digitized characters even before that, and the success of Capcom’s Street Fighter II only helped them convince the management of their idea. Boon said the development team initially consisted of four people — himself as a programmer, artists John Tobias and John Vogel, and Dan Forden as sound designer. The game’s budget was around $1 million. According to Richard Divizio and Daniel Pesina, Mortal Kombat had actually begun when Tobias along with Divizio and the brothers Daniel and Carlos Pesina planned to create a ninja-themed fighting game, however this idea was rejected by Midway’s management. Instead, Midway sought to make an action game based on the upcoming movie Universal Soldier and featuring a digitized version of martial arts film star Jean-Claude Van Damme, but he was already in negotiations with another company for a video game that ultimately was never released. Divizio then convinced Tobias to return to their original project. In the end, Van Damme was parodied in the game in the form of Johnny Cage (with whom he shares his name’s initials, JC), a narcissistic Hollywood movie star who performs a split punch to the groin in a nod to a scene from Bloodsport. Tobias credited other inspirations as having come from the Asian martial arts cinema. Boon later said, “Since the beginning, one of the things that have separated us from other fighting games is the crazy moves we’ve put in it, like fireballs and all the magic moves, so to speak.” According to Tobias, the game’s ultraviolent content had not been originally intended and was only implemented gradually as the development progressed. The concept of Fatalities in particular evolved from the “dizzied” mechanic in earlier fighting games. Boon said that he hated the “dizzied” mechanic, but that it was fun to have one’s opponent get dizzied and get in a free hit. Boon and Tobias decided they could eliminate the aggravation of getting dizzied by having it occur at the end of the fight after the outcome had already been decided. An early version of the game used two more buttons for middle punch and kick attacks. Mortal Kombat was reportedly developed in 10 months from 1991 to 1992, with a test version seeing limited release halfway through the development cycle. As a demo version of the game, which featured only six characters (all male), became internally popular within Midway offices, the team was given more time to work on it, resulting in the addition of Sonya to the roster. Footage for the game’s digitized characters was filmed with Tobias’ personal Hi-8 camcorder. The final arcade game used eight megabytes of graphics data, with each character having 64 colours and around 300 frames of animation. The team had difficulty settling on a name for the game. Ed Boon has stated that for six months during development “nobody could come up with a name nobody didn’t hate.” Some of the names suggested were Kumite, Dragon Attack, Death Blow, and Fatality. One day, someone had written down “combat” on the drawing board for the names in Boon’s office and someone wrote a K over the C, according to Boon, “just to be kind of weird.” Pinball designer Steve Ritchie was sitting in Boon’s office, saw the word “Kombat” and said to him, “Why don’t you name it Mortal Kombat?”, a name that Boon stated “just stuck.” John Tobias recalled this a bit differently, saying it “came about during the trademark process in naming the game. We really liked Mortal Combat as a name, but it couldn’t get past legal.” Since then, the series has begun frequently using the letter K in place of the letter C when it has the hard C sound. In the United States, RePlay reported Mortal Kombat to be the second-most-popular upright arcade cabinet in September 1992. It then topped the RePlay upright arcade cabinet charts from October to November 1992, then from February to March 1993, and then in November 1993. It also topped the Play Meter arcade chart in December 1992. It was the second top-grossing arcade game of the Summer of 1993, below NBA Jam, according to RePlay. It was one of America’s top two highest-grossing arcade games of 1993 (along with NBA Jam), exceeding the $300,000,000 (equivalent to $630,000,000 in 2023) domestic box office gross of the film Jurassic Park the same year. It also topped the Sega CD sales chart in June 1994. In November 1993, Acclaim announced that they had shipped more than three million copies of Mortal Kombat for home systems, counting the SNES, Genesis, Game Boy and Game Gear versions combined. The game sold 3 million copies worldwide in its first three weeks of release. In the United States, it was the top-selling Sega Genesis and SNES game in January 1994. In the United Kingdom, it was the top-selling home video game in October 1993, the top-selling Sega Master System game for four months in 1994 (from May to August), and the top-selling Mega CD game in June 1994. By July 1994, the home cartridge versions had sold more than 6 million units worldwide and grossed over $300,000,000 (equivalent to $630,000,000 in 2023) in sales revenue. As of 2000, it has sold 6.5 million cartridges across all home consoles, with the Genesis version accounting for the majority of sales. An additional million cartridges of the Game Boy version were sold. As of 2002, the original arcade version has sold 24,000 arcade units and grossed an estimated $570 million. The game also generated licensing fees from films and TV shows, bringing total game and licensing revenue to $1.5 billion as of 2002.
