Mortal Kombat (universe)

Mortal Kombat dragon logo.

Mortal Kombat is a media franchise originally created by Midway in 1992. The series started out as an over-the-top gorey fighting game, but ballooned into a massive franchise including over 20 video games, multiple films, television series, comic books, and various other forms of media.

Personal

When the first Mortal Kombat was made it was quite popular in my school. I remember first seeing it played by my cousin at a movie theater arcade and being shocked at the $0.50 per play price tag. Since the game had just come out, he was still new to it, and didn't get very far, but I was very impressed by the graphics. My fellow middle school students were hyped up for the home console release ("Mortal Monday") on 1993-09-13, although I didn't get the game, and played and saw very little of it. However, when Mortal Kombat II came out on home consoles, a neighbor of mine got it and I played his game many times. My friend Jeremy got Mortal Kombat 3 for DOS, and I played that game so much I even created my own strategy guide for it. In high school, my girlfriend's brother bought Mortal Kombat Trilogy for the PlayStation, and my girlfriend and I played many games together (her favorite character was Sindel). Later, I bought a used copy of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 for the SNES at FuncoLand, but I didn't play it too much. I saw the 1995 film and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation after each was released on home video. For several years I was quite enamored by the game series, but really only when playing against another human. I tried several times to beat the games in single player mode, but all of the releases I played have such horrible cheating artificial intelligence, it's a exercise in frustration. I understand that the game can be beaten quite easily by gaming the AI, but that isn't fun to me. Now I view the early games as having been created for little more than shock value, and built upon horrible controls and bad play mechanics. I haven't played any of the later releases, so I don't know if the formula has been improved upon.