Mortal Kombat GENESIS

Mortal Kombat is Midway’s 1992 fighting game, ported to the Mega Drive/Genesis in 1993 as part of a same-day, four-console release (“Mortal Monday”) that was one of the biggest marketing pushes video games had seen up to that point. The story follows the tenth Mortal Kombat tournament, ending with the Shaolin monk Liu Kang facing down the sorcerer Shang Tsung — but the plot was never really the draw.

What set it apart from Street Fighter II, its obvious rival, was a five-button-plus-block layout instead of six attack buttons, a juggling system that let a well-timed launcher keep an opponent airborne through a full combo, and — most famously — the Fatality: a finishing move performed on an already-defeated opponent that turned the last hit of every match into a small, gruesome cutscene. Genesis owners got the uncensored version, with the Fatalities’ blood intact; the SNES release of the same year dyed the blood gray and toned down the finishers to fit Nintendo’s content policy at the time, a difference that became a minor console-war talking point on its own.

The combination of digitized actors instead of hand-drawn sprites, the Fatality shock value, and the marketing blitz made this the game that put Mortal Kombat on the map before the series became the long-running franchise it is today.

Controls:

↑ = up
→ = right
↓ = down/block
← = left

A = low punch
B = low kick
C = high punch

Enter = Start