Mortal Kombat arrived in 1992 as one of many arcade games chasing Capcom’s Street Fighter II, and it looked like none of them. Its fighters were video recordings of real martial artists, and at the end of a bout the winner could kill the loser: tear out a heart, pull off a head with the spine attached. British reviewers were not impressed at first. Americans were. Within fourteen months the home versions had sold in millions, the two console makers had released visibly different editions, and two US senators were showing clips of it at a hearing on violence in video games. The industry’s answer to that hearing was the ratings board that still labels games in North America, the ESRB.
Fast facts
- Developer: Midway, the video game arm of Williams, in Chicago.
- Creators: Ed Boon (programming) and John Tobias, leading a team Retro Gamer put at four people.
- Arcade release: 1992; in British arcades by November 1992 at 50p a play.
- Graphics: digitised sprites filmed from actors.
- Home versions: published by Acclaim on 13 September 1993, “Mortal Monday”, for the Mega Drive, Super NES, Game Boy and Game Gear; later the Mega-CD and Amiga.
- Controversy: blood removed from the Super NES version; the game was a central exhibit at the US Senate hearings of 9 December 1993.
- Series: still running, published since 2011 by Warner Bros. and made by NetherRealm Studios.
Filming the fighters
Boon told Retro Gamer that the game was “our response to a number of things”: Street Fighter II had been “huge in 1991”, Midway had no fighting game, and the company “had this new digitised images technology, which (at the time) was state of the art”. The team were also fans of Enter the Dragon, Bloodsport and Big Trouble in Little China. The digitising work built on video techniques that Warren Davis, the programmer of Q*bert, had been developing at Williams for several years. “People were used to seeing the more ‘cartoony’ graphics of Street Fighter,” Boon said, “so our graphics looked much more realistic by comparison.”
The actors performed each move in front of a video camera, and the pictures went straight into a PC to be retouched dot by dot. The makers told SNES Force in 1993 that each character took about a day of studio time and three to six takes a move, and that one actor, the martial arts instructor Daniel Pesina, played Johnny Cage, Scorpion and Sub-Zero, changing how he moved for each. Edge and C&VG both later named Pesina as Johnny Cage. Boon recalled that the whole game took “roughly eight months” from start to finish.
The team also made choices that set the game apart from Capcom’s. Instead of pulling back on the joystick to block, the player pressed a block button: “We always found it odd that you would get a ‘free block’ if someone was attacking you while you were walking backwards,” Boon explained. Juggling a helpless opponent in the air was found by accident in testing and kept. And at the end of the second won round the loser stood dazed while the announcer said “Finish him!”, giving the winner a moment to perform a secret fatality. “Everyone on the team contributed ideas for the fatalities,” Boon said.
A cool reception in Britain
Computer and Video Games reviewed the arcade machine in November 1992 and gave it 72%. Paul Anglin liked some of the “pretty good (not to mention violent) moves”, singling out Sub-Zero’s harpoon, but found them hard to pull off and thought the digitised fighters looked as though they had been laid on top of the backgrounds. “It was a nice idea to combine the brilliant graphics of Pitfighter with the superb gameplay of Streetfighter 2,” he wrote, “but unfortunately it just hasn’t paid off.”
Mortal Monday
Acclaim released the home versions on the same day in September 1993 and gave the day a name: Mortal Monday. C&VG, Super Play and SNES Force all printed the date, 13 September. Acclaim spent £2.2 million marketing the game in Britain alone, according to Edge. David Sheff, writing in the afterword to his history of Nintendo, described children “breathless” and parents “worried” as the day approached.
The two 16-bit versions were not the same game. Nintendo would not allow blood, so Sculptured Software’s Super NES version, a 16-megabit cartridge, turned it into grey “sweat” and toned down the fatalities. Probe Software’s Mega Drive version, which C&VG reviewed first in August 1993 and called “the best one-on-one Megadrive beat ’em up ever”, started without the gore too, but “programmers Probe have included a secret cheat mode that will open the flood gates for the red stuff to flow”: the fatalities were all there. Sega had already started its own ratings, and gave the game MA-13. That rating had consequences in some homes: an eleven-year-old wrote to Sega Visions in December 1993 that his mother would only let him have general audience games, so he could play Mortal Kombat in the arcade but not at home.
Players chose the blood. Sheff reported that three million copies sold in the two months after Mortal Monday and that the Sega version outsold Nintendo’s two to one. Boon’s own verdict on the Super NES game was blunt: “When we found out that the blood would have to be replaced with ‘sweat’, we knew that version was doomed.” Acclaim’s chief executive, Greg Fischbach, told Edge in 1998 that the first game had sold six million copies worldwide.
An Amiga version was in the shops by the start of 1994. Amiga Power’s Stuart Campbell began his review “I hate beat-’em-ups, and I hate Mortal Kombat in particular”, and ended it surprised: “despite Mortal Kombat being rubbish on every other format in the world, it’s the Amiga’s best beat-’em-up to date.”
The Senate hearings
On 9 December 1993 Senators Joe Lieberman and Herb Kohl held a joint hearing on violence in video games. The games on show were Mortal Kombat and Sega’s Mega-CD game Night Trap. Accounts differ on how the senators came to the subject; Lieberman’s own, as he told it to Edge in 1998, began with his chief of staff, Bill Andresen, whose nine-year-old son wanted the game. “I said, ‘Let’s get one of these things and look at it.’ I was startled. It was very violent and, as you know, rewarded violence.”
At the hearing the two console makers turned on each other (see the 1993 hearings and Howard Lincoln entries). Nintendo’s Lincoln contrasted his company’s bloodless Mortal Kombat with Sega’s. Sega’s Bill White replied that Nintendo had taken out the blood but kept the fighting and sold it to all ages, while Sega’s version carried a rating. Not everyone thought the senators were right to worry. Ken Williams, the head of Sierra On-Line, wrote in a guest editorial for Sega Visions that “Congress focused on the violence in Mortal Kombat, and on Night Trap” and asked whether Congress had seen Schindler’s List, though he supported “a strong ratings system”.
That was what the industry built. Its trade association, the Interactive Digital Software Association, was formed in April 1994, and the new, independent Entertainment Software Rating Board began rating games that autumn. Sega Visions told readers in October 1994 that the new ratings would be in the shops by Christmas. Lincoln later admitted that the stand on Mortal Kombat had cost Nintendo: “We definitely used the ‘Mortal Kombat’ experience as a learning experience… we got a huge amount of criticism—not only by gamers, but even by parents saying that we had set ourselves up to be censors.”
Sequels
Mortal Kombat II was in the arcades by the start of 1994, when Edge reviewed the coin-op, with more fighters and more fatalities. Not everyone approved: Sega’s Yu Suzuki told Edge in 1994 that it was “too violent and bloody for young children. I think it would have been a bigger hit if it hadn’t been as violent.” When Acclaim’s home versions came out in 1994, Nintendo allowed the blood. “That version turned out to be perfect,” Boon said. “Great graphics, great gameplay and lots of BLOOD!”
Mortal Kombat 3 followed in 1995, with a run button and secret “Kombat Kodes”; by then the team told Nintendo Power that Williams consulted on the home versions but did not develop them. Mortal Kombat 4 (1997) moved the fighters to polygons, and Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance followed in 2002 for the next generation of consoles. Paul W. S. Anderson’s 1995 film, with Christopher Lambert as Raiden, took more than $122 million worldwide, Retro Gamer reported, and was followed by Mortal Kombat: Annihilation in 1997.
When Midway went bankrupt in 2009, Warner Bros. bought Mortal Kombat and most of the company, and the Chicago studio became NetherRealm Studios (the Midway entry tells that story). NetherRealm’s Mortal Kombat of 2011 went back to fighting on a 2D plane, and its Mortal Kombat 1, which restarted the story, came out on 19 September 2023; Warner Bros. said then that the series had sold more than 80 million games. In October 2025 Digital Eclipse and Atari released Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection, emulations of the arcade and home versions of the first four games and their spin-offs. A second film called Mortal Kombat II reached American cinemas on 8 May 2026.
Released source code
The original arcade program has not been published by its rights holders. The Legacy Kollection runs the original games under emulation.
Sources
- Computer and Video Games issue 132, November 1992, p. 99: arcade review (Midway, 50p a play, 72%). Issue 141, August 1993, p. 48: Mega Drive review (Probe Software; the gore cheat; “the best one-on-one Megadrive beat ’em up ever”; out 13 September, “Mortal Monday”). Issue 179, October 1996, p. 95: Daniel Pesina as Johnny Cage in the first two games.
- Super Play issue 11, September 1993, p. 42: Super NES review (Acclaim; Sculptured Software; 16 Mbit; release 13 September, Mortal Monday; no blood).
- SNES Force issue 3, September 1993, pp. 9 and 27: the makers’ question-and-answer session (filming, the actors, Pesina’s three characters, takes per move, “the blood’s in the arcade version!”) and Mortal Monday.
- Edge Atari Jaguar supplement, issue 22, July 1995, p. 7: Pesina (Johnny Cage) and Ho Sung Pak (Liu Kang) as Mortal Kombat stars.
- Retro Gamer issue 40, 2007, pp. 27–30, “Blood Simple: the history of Mortal Kombat”: Ed Boon on the game’s origins, the team, the eight months of development, blocking, juggling, the fatalities, digitised graphics and Warren Davis, the Super NES “sweat” and Mortal Kombat II, the films.
- Edge issue 12, September 1994, p. 17: Acclaim’s £2.2 million UK marketing spend. Issue 59, June 1998, p. 22: Greg Fischbach on sales of six million and four million. Issue 66, Christmas 1998, p. 81: Joseph Lieberman’s account of how the hearings began. Issue 6, March 1994, p. 70: the Mortal Kombat II coin-op. Issue 9, June 1994, p. 50: Yu Suzuki on Mortal Kombat II. Issue 49, September 1997, p. 15: Mortal Kombat 4’s polygon engine. Issue 118, Christmas 2002: Deadly Alliance. Issue 225, March 2011, p. 38: NetherRealm’s Mortal Kombat.
- David Sheff, Game Over (1993; GamePress edition with new chapters by Andy Eddy, 1999), pp. 429–30 (Mortal Monday, sales in the first two months, the Sega and Nintendo versions) and pp. 460–61 (the “sweat”, Lincoln on the backlash, the hearings, Bill White and the MA-13 rating, the IDSA in April 1994, the ESRB in autumn 1994).
- Amiga Power issue 33, January 1994: Stuart Campbell’s Amiga review (£29.99).
- Sega Visions, December 1993, p. 18: reader’s letter on the MA-13 rating. April/May 1994: Ken Williams’s guest editorial. October/November 1994, p. 4: the new industry-wide ratings due by Christmas.
- Nintendo Power issue 72, May 1995, pp. 23–25: the Mortal Kombat 3 team, the run button, Kombat Kodes and the home versions.
- C-SPAN, “Video Game Violence”, 9 December 1993 (public record of the Senate hearing). https://www.c-span.org/program/senate-committee/video-game-violence/129470
- Warner Bros. Games, “Warner Bros. Games Launches Mortal Kombat 1”, September 2023 (web, secondary): the launch date and “more than 80 million games”. https://warnerbrosgames.com/article/mk1
- Digital Eclipse, “Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection Launch FAQ” (web, secondary): released 30 October 2025; emulations of the original games. https://www.digitaleclipse.com/media/mortal-kombat-legacy-kollection-launch-faq
- Variety, “Box Office: ‘Mortal Kombat II’ Aims for $40 Million-Plus Debut”, May 2026 (web, secondary). https://variety.com/2026/film/box-office/box-office-mortal-kombat-2-opening-weekend-projections-devil-wears-prada-2-1236738575/
- For Midway’s history, the bankruptcy and the sale to Warner Bros., see the Midway entry and its sources.