Hey G1s! In my last blog, I talked about how obsessed I was with MK and MKII on the Sega Genesis. I remember literally making notes on how to convince my mom to let me get them, since they were notorious for the blood, the gore, the fatalities, the very high level of violence, etc. All things my mother detested. But what I really want to share today are my very first encounters with Mortal Kombat - both of which are burned in my mind. The first involves the burning rumors about "Immortal Kombat" that spread through my middle school; the second involves my actual first encounter with the arcade machine, and the classic memories that surround that. I was about 12 or 13 (in 1992, 1993) when MK first hit the arcades. Or at least, that's when I first heard of it. In my 8th grade math class I had a friend named Hieu who came in one day bursting at the seams. Everyone said "Hieu, what's up?" and he proceeded to tell us an incredible tale... he had gone to see his cousin that weekend down in Virginia (or up in Pennsylvania ... I can't remember which anymore), and they had gone to an arcade together. That's where his cousin had shown him this wild new game ... "Immortal Kombat." That's how he remembered it, and he described it this way: "It's amazing, just amazing. There are all these gods, like the god of lightning, and the god of ice, and the god of fire, and the god of robots, tons of them. And they all fight, and there is tons of blood, and at the end of the fight you can KILL the other guy. Like, really freaking kill them! Like, pull their head off with the spine attached. Yes, I'm serious. Yes! Yes!! I'm serious, guys. You can totally pull their head off!!!!!" Needless to say, among all the video-game playing males in John T. Baker Middle School, the rumor spread like wildfire. We were all buzzing about Immortal Kombat. Inaccuracies aside (I wonder what he thought Johnny Cage was... God of Movies? And Sonya??), everyone started hearing rumors from their half-brother in New York, or their cousin in Seattle, etc., about Mortal Kombat. Then... it arrived in our area. A kid I knew named Ryan, the younger brother of a girl my age, had his birthday party at a local pizza parlor. In the small accompanying arcade, Ryan reported, they had a brand new, shiny Mortal Kombat arcade machine. And he played it. Nobody knew any moves or fatalities back then, fighting games were more or less still in their infancy, so it was amazing when he told us that "The Scorpion" had a "lasso" and screamed "YOU GET OVER HERE, NOW!" when he used it. Again, misinformation abounds. The other move he and his friends were able to figure out was Kano's 360 degree ball move, and they were able to win a few games against the computer using that and sweeps. Only they thought Kano was "the Terminator, with his eye all exposed and everything, and they gave him a new name because he has to protect his true identity, and he's in the tournament to kill John Conner, and he can shoot lasers from his eye now, and he's like a thousand times more deadly because he was programmed with new martial arts, and he can spin into a ball, and I think Johnny Cage is John Conner hiding behind a new name and the Terminator is going to win this time." I'm not kidding! That was an actual rumor going around, and a popular one, too. Of course, now we know that Kano WAS based on the Terminator with the eye exposed, so I guess their inspiration was apparent. Two more funny rumors about Mortal Kombat that came out a couple months later, as a lot more kids visited that pizza parlor and started learning moves and, eventually, fatalities: "So this guy Raiden, he's Japanese, and Liu Kang is Chinese, and they hate each other and if you play one against the other then Liu Kang turns into a dragon and tries to eat the lightning guy only he's electric and so the dragon explodes." and "Scorpion is really a zombie, and if you do his fatality he takes off his human mask and shows his zombie face and then he shoots zombie fire from his mouth and converts the loser into a skeleton slave, and if you know the right code I heard you can make the skeleton slave fight for you!!" Both of those two rumors lasted at least a month or two. To most of us, who had never played the game, we were awestruck and believed anything we heard. Then, I actually encountered the game... So here is the second part of my tale, when I finally get to play Mortal Kombat myself. My dad works at a local university, and they have a game room with a lot of pool tables, ping pong, and arcade machines. That game room was also the first place I played NBA Jam and Samurai Shodown. But I would always escape there the first chance I got, to watch the older college kids spend their laundry money on the games. I usually had about $1 to spend, which was four plays on most machines. One weekend I run down to the game room and lo and behold, Mortal Kombat has arrived. And the college kids are lined up ten deep behind it, calling their turns and watching the various battles. One kid is already really good and beating most challengers, usually as Sub-Zero or as Raiden. Another kid was really, really good as Sonya, and would knock everyone out of the air with her square jump attack thing, and use that spider leg grab when they least expected it - he was very tricky. Most kids (including me) only knew a couple moves and generally played as Scorpion or Liu Kang or Kano, who were seen as the coolest characters. When it was my turn to play, the really good guy had just been beat (luckily) so I was up against the guy who had beat him. This was a college nerd, probably an engineering or comp sci major, and about ten years older than I was. Still, I knew a few moves from magazines that had been published and my friends who had invested a lot of time and money at the pizza parlor. So I picked Liu Kang and went to work. I used fireballs to keep the guy at bay, used the flying kicks to surprise him, and tried a lot of sweeps and random uppercuts. No luck - he picked Johnny Cage and although I won the first round, he won the next two. I was out. I spend the rest of my dollar fighting the really good guy, who quickly assumed his dominant position. He also used the first fatality I'd ever seen - Kano's heart rip. He also taught me how to do Kano's knife throw and Raiden's teleport. I was impressed, and stayed in the arcade far longer than I was supposed to, my dad had to come claim me, and was a little pissed... even though he was surprised at the sheer number of kids gathered around the MK machine. After that, MK machines popped up pretty much everywhere, most of the rumors disappeared, and life went on as normal. When MKII came out in the arcades there was very little notice given - the first game had sort of used up that shock value, and people by then were more or less obsessed with Street Fighter II. It was at that point that I think the MK series more/less transferred most of its fan base to the home consoles. So there you go - ancient rumors from times long gone. Mortal Kombat, with its gore and new features, caused a LOT of wild speculation, much of it completely hilarious. And then when I actually encountered it, it had a tremendous grip on every arcade it was placed in, memorizing college students everywhere. Thanks for reading! Next up ... a review of the PC game Dark Fall, and the extreme terror it induced!