Razoric said:
MK1 helped revitalize arcades,
Sure, you can say "helped." But it was SF2 that got people going to arcades again. Games that followed, including Mortal Kombat, helped people to continue going to arcades for several years.
[Mortal Kombat] is still selling strong today with it's 6th version in the main series, had 2 hollywood films made after it, countless comics / toys/spin-off games, basically was the reason why we have a rating system today, spawned a shitload of clones
Do you realize that if you change a few things, this describes Street Fighter, which has had countless sequels/upgrades made?
and helped to tarnish Nintendo's reputation (teh kiddy console) for years to come. Anyone trying to downplay MK1 and how it's influenced this industry is a douche.
Nah, Nintendo's "teh kiddy" image didn't come around until the N64. They only lost sales with MK1, then after they changed their policies, games like Killer Instinct, Doom, etc. all hit the system.
Porridge said:
If MK was such a bad game, why did so many people play it? Why did gamers continually choose the MK franchise over clones like Time Killers? Maybe people actually liked the graphics and the sound. The characters and the story.
You answered your own question. Compared to other games out at the time, MK1's "realistic" look and gore got people flocking to arcade machines. I guarantee you if the game did not have the blood and fatalities, it woul have bombed. MK1's game play SUCKED and it lacked in its character roster compared to other fighting games at the time, but people didn't care about that; they liked the look of the game and the gore. It also seems to be a "western" thing, as the game never took off in Asia.
Also AGAIN regarding MK clones. There were not that many, and the ones you guys are menitoning didn't even come out until several years AFTER Mortal Kombat was released. And that still isn't 20.
Games like Street Fighter saw far more clones. And after VF, the new thing was 3D fighters.
MK hit its peak with the second game in arcades. It had already begun to fizzle out by the time MK3 was released. People had already moved on to Killer Instinct and to 3D fighters by that time. I'm certainly NOT trying to say that MK's popularity wasn't still there, as the first movie also came out during this time, but this is when it started to decline. By MK4, it was "dead" until they revived it a few years later with Deadly Alliance.
What fighting game had a storyline before Mortal Kombat?
Uh...Street Fighter II also had a storyline. You want more "story depth?" Try Art Of Fighting or Fatal Fury.
But none of that matters because people weren't going to arcades to play the game and see the story. People were going to play against each other and hit the fatalities.
Why would you ever say because of the "shock", that's why people played it? As pointed out by another poster, Time Killers featured limbs being hacked off during battle. If gamers were attracted only to shock value, Time Killers would be getting sequels these days. MK was good. Hey it was fun then and it's fun now.
I was the one that talked about Time Killers, BTW. Time Killers didn't fair as well for obvious reasons. Even compared to MK, it had horrible game play. But the main reason was its cartoon-like visuals. If it was digitized and had the same limb-hacking feature, it would have beat Mortal Kombat.
Some of you guys seem to be forgetting that digitized games were the big thing in the early 90s. It wasn't just Mortal Kombat (which had games like Pit Fighter preceeding it anyway), there was also NBA Jam, all the shitty FMV-based Sega CD games like Night Trap, the 7th Guest on PC, etc. That was the big thing until polygons really came around, and also pre-rendered visuals for a short time.
BTW, Death Race 2000 isn't even worth mentioning because of the era's extremely primitive graphics.
Death Race is worth mentioning simply because it shows that even with extremely primitive graphics, the issue was still there.
Fight for Freeform said:
I did an essay on my theory as to why MK stormed up all this contraversy. My thesis was that it was all because of the visuals. Prior to MK and Pit Fighter, most videogame violence was seen as cartoon violence, and tolerated to an extent. The blood in SF never got as much attention as MK.
MK really made it look like real people committing acts of violence on other people. Plus, compared to most games, it was ultra-violence (ripping out people's hearts) and depicting it with relative realism.
I did a comparison...a cartoon show with violence, like TMNT...compared to a live action show , where the violence included people ripping each other's heads off (done insomuch detail that you'd see the spine come out along with it), pulling hearts out, etc. The second show would garner more attention as far as violence is concerned.
Makes sense to me. Although it's always fun to load up MK1 and see how completely CARTOON-LIKE the game looks now, with the stupid-looking blood "balls" that fly out and the hand-drawn bones and such.
