In the ’90s, and at the height of arcade gaming, I was a teenager on a mission. The sounds of clinking quarters, the digital soundtrack of excitement, filled the air of arcades like the one at the Space Port. It was games all around you with nothing beckoning you onward quite like a number of coins in a coin slot. Along with the appeal of putting the pedal to the metal and NBA JAMing like there was on your face, there was and will always be one very special staple that defined this arcade era: Mortal Kombat.
The first encounter I had with Mortal Kombat is still crystal clear in my mind. I was just a kid at the time, probably about six or seven years old. The game was set to hit North American arcades soon, and a couple of the older neighborhood kids had found their way onto the current one. They were using a cheat sheet for the player on the left side of the screen to pick Sheeva, the four-armed Sai, from Mortal Kombat 3. I didn’t even know who they were. But I was drawn to them. I was drawn to the illuminated display. And eventually, I was drawn to the action on the screen.
At the time, I was almost completely unaware that Mortal Kombat was far from just a neat fighting game. It was actually a cause, about to provoke a massive effect—a sea change in the nature of video game ratings and how games were (and weren’t) being regulated. “Nationwide, lightning is striking,” began Sinatra in his 1946 hit. But it’s a poor kind of lightning that doesn’t also make thunder audible. And sure enough, there was hardly anything to be heard, nationwide or elsewhere, about the existence and content of the Mortal Kombat game when it was first released.
The original Mortal Kombat game from Midway Games quickly became a hit when it was released in 1992. That first game and its offspring sport a ragtag flock of fighters, from the likes of the icy Sub-Zero to the fiery Scorpion, each of whom has at least one or even two over-the-top finishing moves, which are called “Fatalities.” The game was incredibly popular because of its over-the-top violence, revolutionary at the time. Yet somehow, that format of the videophone death match has survived all the way to 2021.
Once I began to play the game, I was instantly addicted. The life-like digitized graphics were a great way to express the appearance of the character. All of the characters had their own distinctive look and abilities. The controls were superb, and the actions performed during the sequence of a special move were clear and defined. Each and every character had their own combination of attacks that could be performed. Some characters had special moves that were well-suited to their abilities, whether it was the ice projectiles launched by Sub-Zero or the telekinesis used by Ermac. No move was unclear or unreasonable to imagine being performed by the selected character.
The success of Mortal Kombat was by no means confined to arcade machines. By now, home consoles had become a major moneymaking opportunity, and it was to the machines that arcades were transplanted. Soon enough, the games were ported to the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), two main contenders in the console wars. Dialog had famously gotten the Genesis version past the censors, who had watched for the first time ever as a video game was played to see what mature content (in this case, what kinds of work and play should or should not be allowed to be done for money).
The more popular Mortal Kombat became, the more controversy it seemed to attract. But there’s no mystery as to why it has drawn so much fire: This is a game that wallows in gore. It is notorious for its “fatalities”—moves that end a fight in a graphic display of violence. The 1995 U.S. Senate hearings on video game violence that hammered Night Trap would hardly have been necessary if Mortal Kombat had not appeared in the first place. The hearings led to the 1994 formation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board, which still governs video game content.
An important event in the argument over depictions of violence in video games took place in 1993 when the US Senate held hearings on the matter. Two key senators in this dialogue were Joe Lieberman and Herb Kohl. At the heart of the debate, and the reason these Senate hearings had even been called, was the perception that video games had important effects on the behavior of Americans, especially young ones, who played them. The hearings focused on two games in particular: Mortal Kombat and Night Trap. Both games had content that was violent and, in the case of Night Trap, sexually suggestive. Also, Mortal Kombat had a component in which lifelike characters who had just been maimed or killed would shout catchphrases at each other.
Amidst the hearings, one side — legislators and fearful parents — have heaped the most scorn and moral outrage on games like Mortal Kombat. They contend that these are the games that most clearly push the boundaries of taste and playability, to a point where even the half-secret second lives, the sorts of ingenious cruelties that allow us, in the end, to even think of the phrase “video game victim,” seem to take on a new edge of wrong.
When I was a young gamer, I found it absolutely thrilling that my private pastime was suddenly a matter of national import. What transpired in congressional corridors in the winter of 1993 was essentially a live version of the conversations that I—and many others—had with our parents about what, exactly, we were spending so many hours doing in front of the television and whether it was going to turn us into Clockwork Oranges. (Mom, Dad: I turned out okay. Really. Stop worrying.) The point of the hearings, in my humble opinion and shared to some extent by the writers of this magazine, was to scare the bejesus out of parents so that by the end of the 1993 holiday season, they would have stopped asking questions, because it would have been nice for sales.
When it looked as though the video game business might get hit with regulations because of a 1994 congressional hearing over violent video games, designers and publishers did something very smart: They formed a self-regulatory body. The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) was established that same year to keep the video game industry honest and to make it clear to consumers, via an easy-to-understand labeling scheme, which games were right for their households and which ones were not.
A spectrum of ratings was set up by the ESRB, from “Early Childhood” to “Adults Only.” Mortal Kombat, lauded for its launch of video game bloodletting, was rated “Mature.” This and the numerical rating system, however, was only the beginning of the ESRB’s power to shape popular culture. The ESRB’s most significant threat to free speech, aside from potential decency laws, is the appearance of their content evaluation on actual video games. This evaluation comes in the form of “content descriptors.”
The first time I saw ESRB ratings was on the game boxes sold at my video store. They stood out to me because it was a store my family had been going to for a very long time, and I knew the store’s layout very well. I’d also seen countless game boxes on its shelves, so when the ratings first appeared, the box art had a way of catching my eye. Because of that, it wasn’t long at all before I, too, became a convert to the revised way of assessing a game’s promises and a whole lot more.
For the video game industry, the establishment of the ESRB was key. The clear directions and guidelines, which rate games based on content, now meant that game developers could work without fear of sudden reprisals in the form of censorship. This hitherto unregulated industry could now push the boundaries of creative content without fearing that some external moral authority would descend upon the game creators and slap a label on those games that they deemed too violent or too sexy.
The formation of the ESRB and the greater dialogue about the video game industry’s content and responsibility have had a long and profound effect on the industry. In 1993 and 1994, the conversation centered on the satisfaction of games—that is, if you couldn’t tear someone apart within the game, would you really enjoy it? But what fueled these conversations and the formation of the ESRB was a game many had heard of but few had played and fewer still understood.
Freedom and accountability allowed in the ESRB ratings system let game developers investigate all sorts of grown-up, sophisticated themes. Of course, freeing up a developer to be creative meant the creators also had to be mindful of the intelligence of their audience. This is said right in the ESRB’s taxpayer-funded TV spot: “Video games are not just kids’ stuff anymore. The people who play these games have incredibly sophisticated tastes.” Not stated in the spot and probably a point ESRB would prefer me not to highlight: the average gamer is a 34-year-old man.
Parents are now able to make adequate and informed decisions about the video games they allow their children to engage in. They have a better understanding of the content of the video games and can set limits for their children on time, multi-player and overall gaming aspects. That, in turn, is beneficial because it changes the perception of video games from a seemingly dangerous and mindless activity into an experience that can be shared and understood by people of all ages.
The ESRB has shown that when it comes to keeping inappropriate video game content away from kids, it is on the right track. The government scientists who conducted “The 2011 National Survey of Youth and Violence” confirmed the positive impact of the ESRB’s content rating system. The study placed a large portion of the blame for real-world violence at the feet of a multitude of societal factors but almost fully exonerated video games as a pathway to violence. The ESRB’s rating system emerged from the survey as a beacon of light.
How Mortal Kombat Changed Everything: Mortal Kombat didn’t just reshape the video game industry; it also left a lasting impact on pop culture as a whole. Long before the first Mortal Kombat movie, the original game had truly “arrived” in the cultural conversation. Its reach extended far beyond the then-still-nascent game industry — into film, television, music, and more. And if MK wasn’t riffing on, or ripping off, some other part of pop culture… well, it probably was, you’d just have to look really close to find the homage.
When I contemplate my personal history with Mortal Kombat, I realize that the game was a landmark experience in my gaming life. It initiated me not only into the almost underground society of competitive fighting games but also into what seems to be, in my opinion, an almost lost art nowadays: the over-the-top, almost cartoonish violence of the 1990s that people like myself and Dave “Zeb” Goelz grew up with. In addition to that, the game didn’t just throw violence at you for the sake of violence. To me, the violence carried with it a sort of ridiculousness or absurdity that few, if any, games have today.
To sum it up, the influence of Mortal Kombat on the gaming industry can’t be denied. It was, and is, a game that used graphics and a unique fighting style to ligand it to a mechanism to pull teenagers into playing a controversial video game. Also, because of its controversy, it managed to stir up a nationwide debate on violence and video games. Its presence was crucial in the establishment of the ESRB doing right by its historic context in the 1990s, and it forms the spine of not just this story but also that conversation on violence, games, and children.
