Mortal Kombat is an arcade fighting game developed and published by Midway Games in 1992 as the first title in the Mortal Kombat series. It was subsequently released by Acclaim Entertainment for nearly every home video game platform of the time.
The game introduced many key aspects of the Mortal Kombat series, including the unique five-button control scheme and gory finishing moves. The game focuses on the journey of the monk Liu Kang to save Earth from the evil sorcerer Shang Tsung, ending with their confrontation in the tournament known as Mortal Kombat. Mortal Kombat became a best-selling game and remains one of the most popular fighting games in the genre's history, spawning numerous sequels and spin-offs over the following years and decades, beginning with Mortal Kombat II in 1993, and together with the first sequel was the subject of a successful film adaptation in 1995. However, it also sparked much controversy for its depiction of extreme violence and gore using realistic digitized graphics, resulting in the introduction of age-specific content descriptor ratings for video games.
Creators Ed Boon and John Tobias have stated that Midway tasked them with the project of creating a "combat game for release within a year", which the two believed was intended to compete with the popular Street Fighter II. Mortal Kombat was reportedly developed in 10 months from 1991 to 1992, with a test version seeing limited release halfway through the development cycle. Boon said the development team initially consisted of four people - himself as programmer, artists John Tobias and John Vogel, and Dan Forden as sound designer. The final arcade game used eight megabytes of graphics data, with each character having 64 colors and around 300 frames of animation.
Originally, creators Boon and Tobias planned to create an action game 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. 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 and arrogant Hollywood movie star who performs a split punch to the groin in a nod to a scene from Bloodsport.
The concept of fatalities 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.
The team had difficulty settling on a name for the game. 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." The series itself frequently uses the letter "K" in place of the letter "C" when it has the hard C sound.
While many games have been subject to urban legends about secret features and unlockable content, these kinds of myths were particularly rampant among the dedicated fan community of the Mortal Kombat series. The game's creators did little to dispel the rumors, some of which were even made reality in subsequent games. The most notable of these myths spawned from an audit-menu listing titled ERMACS (error macro) on the game's diagnostics screen, which led players to believe that another secret character, a red ninja named Ermac, existed in the game, followed by reports of a glitch where the sprites of either Scorpion or Reptile would flash red during gameplay. While both rumors were false, they proved relevant enough that Midway included the character as a playable in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 and subsequent titles. According to UGO.com, it was also rumored that the SNES version of the game had a cheat code to re-enable the blood and gore, but such a code existed only on the Mega Drive/Genesis version.
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