The first time I saw blood in a video game, I was standing in a dimly lit arcade at the Westland Mall in the summer of 1992. I was fourteen years old, clutching a small fortune in quarters from my paper route money, wide-eyed at the spectacle unfolding before me. A small crowd had gathered around a cabinet plastered with an ominous dragon logo and what looked like martial artists photographed mid-kick. The screen showed something I’d never seen before—realistic-looking people beating the hell out of each other while blood splattered from their wounds. This wasn’t the cartoon violence of Super Mario stomping Goombas or even the stylized combat of Street Fighter II. This was something darker, something that felt dangerous.
“Finish Him!” the game announced in a booming voice that cut through the arcade’s cacophony of bleeps and bloops. The victorious fighter—some yellow-clad ninja—suddenly ripped his mask off, revealing a skull that breathed fire, incinerating his opponent to a charred skeleton. The small crowd erupted in a mixture of disgusted groans and appreciative cheers. I stood there, quarters sweating in my palm, equally horrified and transfixed. I had to play this game. I had to be that yellow ninja.
Mortal Kombat wasn’t just my introduction to fighting games—it was a cultural moment that happened to coincide with that delicate age where you’re desperate to push boundaries and experience things your parents would definitely not approve of. The gore was the initial draw, I won’t lie about that. But what kept me feeding quarters into that machine long after the novelty of the blood had worn off was the game’s distinctive personality and the technical challenge of mastering its controls.
My first attempts at playing were predictably disastrous. Button mashing might get you through the early opponents in Street Fighter II, but Mortal Kombat punished that approach mercilessly. Scorpion (I’d learned the yellow ninja’s name by eavesdropping on the arcade regulars) would destroy me in seconds, and my dreams of pulling off that awesome fire-breathing fatality seemed impossibly distant. But arcades in the early 90s were social spaces—competitive, sure, but also collaborative in a strange way. An older kid named Marcus saw me struggling and, instead of just taking my quarters by challenging me to a match he’d obviously win, showed me the basics.
“You gotta block more,” he advised, demonstrating the back-press timing that wasn’t explained anywhere on the cabinet. “And special moves are different from Street Fighter—they’re all button sequences, not joystick motions plus buttons.” He showed me how to do Scorpion’s spear move—”Get over here!”—which required a specific sequence of button presses rather than the quarter-circle motions I’d tried adapting from my Street Fighter experience. That small act of gaming mentorship changed everything. Within a few weeks, I could hold my own against most casual players, though the arcade sharks would still demolish me without breaking a sweat.
The digitized actors that brought Mortal Kombat’s fighters to life were a technical marvel at the time. I’d later learn that they were actual martial artists and actors photographed performing the moves, their images digitized and implemented into the game. This was why the characters moved with a stiff yet realistic quality completely different from the hand-drawn animation of other fighting games. Sub-Zero, Scorpion, Johnny Cage, Sonya Blade, Kano, Liu Kang, and Raiden—these weren’t just game characters; they were digital avatars of real people frozen in pixelated motion. It created an uncanny valley effect that, combined with the violence, made the game feel more transgressive than its contemporaries.
My favorite character quickly became Sub-Zero, the ice-wielding ninja who could freeze opponents in place. There was something satisfying about temporarily immobilizing my adversary, giving me precious seconds to plan my next move. Plus, his fatality—ripping his opponent’s head off with the spine still attached—was the most shocking of the bunch. I practiced the precise button sequence for that finisher more diligently than I studied for any test that year. Back, back, down, forward, low punch. I would mutter this under my breath while trying to fall asleep, like some macabre bedtime prayer.
The first time I successfully performed Sub-Zero’s fatality in the arcade, I felt a mixture of pride and embarrassment as onlookers reacted. I had accomplished something technologically impressive—the precise inputs required for fatalities were not easy—but it was also undeniably disturbing. A middle-aged woman walking by with her young son shot me a look of pure disgust, making a deliberate detour to avoid the Mortal Kombat cabinet. I felt a twinge of shame followed by the defensive indignation that is the specialty of teenage boys. It’s just a game, I thought, even as I understood on some level that this was different from stomping turtles in Mario.
Knowledge of fatality inputs became precious currency in playground social economies. Kids who couldn’t afford endless quarters at the arcade would trade other valuable intel—where to find the warp whistle in Super Mario Bros. 3, how to access the sound test in Sonic the Hedgehog—for the sacred knowledge of how to perform Kano’s heart-ripping finisher or Raiden’s head-explosion. I had an entire section in my school notebook dedicated to Mortal Kombat inputs, written in a sloppy cipher that mixed numbers and letters just in case a teacher happened to look over my shoulder. “F, F, D, LP” meant “Forward, Forward, Down, Low Punch”—Kano’s heart rip. It was like carrying around forbidden knowledge.
The home console versions of Mortal Kombat landed like a nuclear bomb in the ongoing Nintendo vs. Sega console wars. Nintendo, maintaining their family-friendly image, released a sanitized version for the Super Nintendo where the blood was replaced with “sweat” (gray instead of red) and the fatalities were toned down significantly. Sega, seeing an opportunity to appeal to older gamers, released Genesis Mortal Kombat with a blood code—A, B, A, C, A, B, B—that unlocked the arcade gore. This single decision temporarily shifted the console war in Sega’s favor among my friend group. Kids who had been Nintendo loyalists suddenly developed an interest in “borrowing” their friends’ Genesis systems.
I didn’t own either console version initially, but my friend Tom had the Genesis edition, and our weekend sleepovers became Mortal Kombat marathons. His parents were unusually permissive about game content, or perhaps just oblivious. We’d stay up until 3 AM, fueled by Mountain Dew and Doritos, perfecting our fatality timing and developing increasingly elaborate backstories for the characters. We theorized about the relationships between Sub-Zero and Scorpion, debated whether Johnny Cage was supposed to be Jean-Claude Van Damme, and speculated wildly about what horrors the rumored secret characters might unleash.
Those secret character rumors were a fascinating phenomenon in the pre-internet gaming world. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who had seen a secret fighter in the arcade version. Reptile, a green palette-swap of Scorpion/Sub-Zero, was the first confirmed hidden character, requiring specific conditions to fight (a perfect round on the Pit stage with a shadow flying across the moon). But whispers of other secrets spread through arcades and schoolyards like urban legends. Ermac (Error Macro, from a glitch in the audit menu), Skarlet (a red female ninja), and others were spoken of with the reverence usually reserved for Bigfoot sightings.
I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to verify these rumors through trial and error. Perform a fatality while holding all the buttons down as the timer hits exactly 0? Sure, I’ll try that 20 times. Input some elaborate 30-button sequence at the title screen? Why not? The dedication to uncovering these non-existent secrets bordered on madness, but it was also a beautiful example of collective imagination. We wanted Mortal Kombat’s world to be deeper and more mysterious than it was, and in a way, our shared fantasies made it so.
The cultural controversy surrounding Mortal Kombat seems almost quaint by today’s standards, but it was a genuine moral panic in the early 90s. News segments featured concerned parents and psychologists warning about the desensitizing effects of video game violence. Congressional hearings were actually held, with Senators viewing fatality demonstrations while frowning severely into the cameras. The controversy ultimately led to the creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), the rating system that still exists today. In a very real way, Mortal Kombat’s blood-soaked fatalities created the infrastructure that now warns parents about blood-soaked fatalities.
As a teenager navigating this controversy, I developed my first real arguments about artistic freedom and media effects. I remember defending the game to my mom, who had read a concerned article in some parenting magazine. “It’s just like a martial arts movie,” I insisted. “Nobody thinks Bruce Lee films make people violent.” I’m not sure how convincing my argument was, but she allowed me to eventually get the SNES version, perhaps reasoning that Nintendo’s sanitized take was a reasonable compromise. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I still spent weekends at Tom’s house playing the bloodier Genesis version.
The fighting game tournament scene was just beginning to develop during this period, and Mortal Kombat tournaments had a different vibe from Street Fighter II competitions. Street Fighter players approached the game like a chess match, analyzing frame data and optimal strategies. Mortal Kombat tournaments felt more like theatrical performances, with players going for crowd-pleasing fatalities even when simple victories would suffice. I entered a small tournament at our local arcade, making it to the quarterfinals before being absolutely destroyed by a college-aged guy who played Kano with surgical precision. He ended our match with a heart-ripping fatality and then, seeing my obvious disappointment, took the time to show me some Kano techniques as a consolation prize. That mixture of ruthless competition and community mentorship defined the early fighting game scene for me.
Mortal Kombat’s evolution through the 90s was a fascinating journey to witness firsthand. Mortal Kombat II expanded the roster and fatality options while leaning even harder into the dark humor that had only been hinted at in the original. The addition of Babalities (turning your opponent into a baby) and Friendships (non-violent humorous finishers) showed that Midway was both embracing and parodying their violent reputation. By Mortal Kombat 3, the series had developed its own complex mythology, with storylines about invaded realms and ancient gods that teenage me found impossibly cool and sophisticated.
The technological progression was equally impressive. The original arcade cabinet had seemed like the pinnacle of gaming technology to my 14-year-old eyes, but each subsequent release pushed the digitized actor technique further until Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 squeezed every possible ounce of fidelity from the approach. When Mortal Kombat 4 moved to 3D polygonal models, it was a jarring transition—necessary for the evolution of the series, but something was lost in that move away from the uncanny digitized fighters that had defined the series’ aesthetic.
Looking back on Mortal Kombat from the perspective of my forties, it’s easy to see why it made such an impact on me and my generation. It arrived at the perfect moment—gaming was maturing as a medium but was still primarily marketed to young people, creating a tension between childish perceptions of the hobby and the growing desire for more adult content. Mortal Kombat boldly declared that games could be made for older players, that they could contain content that wasn’t appropriate for everyone, and that was okay. For teenagers desperate to be treated like adults, this was a powerful message.
The violence that seemed so shocking in 1992 looks almost comical today. Those pixelated blood spurts and simplistic fatalities have been so thoroughly surpassed by modern gaming graphics that returning to the original Mortal Kombat can feel like watching a silent film after being raised on modern blockbusters. But the impact remains significant—not just on gaming content and ratings systems, but on how games could create cultural moments that transcended the medium itself.
I’ve played every Mortal Kombat release since that first encounter in the mall arcade, though my skills peaked somewhere around Mortal Kombat II. The recent titles, with their Hollywood-quality graphics and increasingly elaborate fatalities, are technical marvels that make the original look like cave paintings in comparison. But they’ve never quite recaptured the transgressive thrill of that first experience—the shock of seeing something in a game that felt forbidden, dangerous, and thrillingly adult.
Last year, I took my nephew to a retro arcade that had an original Mortal Kombat cabinet. He’s grown up in an era where gaming violence is commonplace, where streaming services show him content far more graphic than anything the original Mortal Kombat offered. He humored me by playing a few rounds, his fingers awkwardly adjusting to the stiff arcade controls so different from his wireless controller at home. “The graphics are really bad,” he observed, not unkindly. I tried to explain the technological achievement those “bad graphics” represented in 1992, how revolutionary the digitized actors had seemed.
He won his second match and the game thundered “Finish Him!” I started to explain how to do a fatality, but before I could finish, he executed Scorpion’s spine rip perfectly. I stared at him, surprised. “What?” he said with a grin. “I looked up all the original fatalities on YouTube. Pretty tame compared to the new ones, but still cool.” I felt a strange mixture of pride and nostalgia watching him perform the same moves that had once seemed so secretive and forbidden, now freely available with a quick internet search.
As we left the arcade, he asked me about the controversy, about what it was like to play Mortal Kombat when it was new and shocking. I tried to convey the moral panic, the congressional hearings, the playground whispers about secret characters. He listened politely but seemed unable to fully grasp how this relatively simple fighting game had caused such an uproar. From his perspective, it was just another milestone in gaming history, something to be catalogued alongside Pong and Pac-Man.
Maybe that’s the true legacy of Mortal Kombat—not just the gameplay innovations or the cultural controversy, but how it helped gaming grow up. Those pixelated fighters and their bloody fatalities pushed boundaries that needed pushing, carved out space for mature content in a medium often dismissed as kids’ stuff, and helped establish video games as a form of entertainment for all ages. For teenage me, Mortal Kombat wasn’t just my first fighting game—it was a rite of passage, a digital rebellion, and a glimpse of how video games would evolve from simple amusements into complex cultural artifacts capable of shocking, disturbing, and yes, even changing society.
As for that yellow ninja who first caught my attention? I still have a small Scorpion figurine on my desk, a nostalgic reminder of quarters well spent and boundaries enthusiastically crossed. GET OVER HERE, indeed.
