I think one of my first, most powerful, orgasms that I ever had as a young ‘Comsie’…didn’t have anything to do with sex at all! Hehehe, it came from seeing a video game ‘fatality’ for the first time in an arcade on the North side of Chicago!

This was in the very early 90’s, my best friends and I were a constant at a few of our local arcades, and playing games was kind of like a full contact sport. This was a time when ‘Street Fighter II’ was KING! No question. Hands down. What was there to even talk about, concerning the reigning champ? Right?

Then…this ‘game’ randomly shows up in our arcade. Sort of like ‘Street Fighter II’, but not quite. The characters were actually real people, first of all…digitized for the game. That was different. People were drawn to it. We started playing. And then…one afternoon, a few weeks later…we saw a player not only win the match…

…But the screen suddenly went dark, he reached out…and he pulled his opponent’s fucking HEAD OFF with the goddamn spine still attached!!! And then held it up for everybody to see while the crowd cheered him on!

What…the FUCK…just happened??? LOL!!!

My friends and I were literally screaming and jumping up and down and shouting…


And thus, the beauty (And the horror) of Mortal Kombat was born!!!

Skip ahead to 1992…and Mortal Kombat is finally going to come out for all of the gaming systems that we have at home for the very first time! No more crowded arcades! No more putting your quarters up for the next battle! No more cheap ass challengers beating you down by doing the same two or three moves over and over again! The game was coming right into our bedrooms, and we were soooo ready!

My friends and I actually went to the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago’s McCormick Place, where all of the newest techs and video games were going to be displayed for the first time. And right there…on a giant screen…volume up to ten…was THIS advertisement!!!

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That guy’s voice is going to live on forever as THE Mortal Kombat voice! Hehehe! We screamed that all day until we were hoarse!!! The excitement was almost more than we could bear. Street Fighter vs Mortal Kombat was like the ‘Michael Jackson vs Prince’ of 90’s video games! You might actually get into fight yourself if you found yourself on the wrong side of the argument! Hehehe! But it was coming! Oh, dear God…it was finally coming home!

First of all, at the time, this was a game that shocked a lot of people into playing it before the ability to actually KILL your enemy was ever a thing! Believe it or not, when it first came out, that was a well guarded secret. It was like a magic trick that only the professionals knew. And there was no ‘casual at-home internet’ back then for most people, so the secret stayed secret until the magazines picked it up. But how could we not play? This was a new fighting game combining some of the most awesome movie characters ever! I can remember when “Big Trouble In Little China” was one of my all time favorite childhood movies! Like EVER! One of the coolest parts of it being the guy who could actually shoot LIGHTNING out of his hands! We freaked out the first time we saw that! It was the coolest thing that we had ever seen at the time. The electricity was, literally, crawling all around him…and he had to make these awesome martial arts movements to charge it up and shoot it out! It’s like…holy SHIT, that guy is amazing! Then there was Bruce Lee, the greatest martial arts actor of all time, and Jean Claude Van Damme…who was the TOP action star of the time! Even bigger than Schwarzenegger and Stallone, if you can imagine.

(Actually, the company reached out to him, and this was almost Jean Claude Van Damme’s Mortal Kombat, with the character of Johnny Cage being modeled after him directly! I don’t know if he turned it down or if he was just out of the developer’s price range, but…you could have been getting a big check right now, JCVD! Just sayin’!)

But the game borrows heavily from these movies and others, and getting the chance to actually take on the role of these characters and use them to beat up on your best friends is always a ton of fun!

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Once the addiction kicked in…we were at the arcade every weekend, seeing if we could learn new tricks. Seeing if that one jerk from the arcade out West could face off against that other jerk from our own arcade…and who would win. Hehehe, it was madness, I tell you! It was a sport of the highest caliber. And when you’ve had a tough time defeating an enemy in a fight…there’s NOTHING more satisfying than being able to teach him a lesson by burning him to ashes or ripping his heart out of his chest while it’s still beating! This was a whole new level of competitive gaming for us! And I still get chills when I think about how amazing it was to be a part of that for the first time!

The obsession got to be so huge that it turned into t-shirts, models, toys, comic books, strategy guides…eventually leading to a few full blown movies (DON’T watch ‘Annihilation’ unless you want to laugh at how mind-bogglingly BAD that movie is!!!), and that original song that was made into a techno dance track that gives me nostalgic feels EVERY time I hear it! Hehehe! It was a phenomenon of epic proportions!

Then…the ‘fatality’ concept got leaked out to parents.


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My, oh MY, did the parents CRY!!!

They screamed, and they raged, and they protested…

I know that we were kids, but we were just having FUN! “It’s just a GAME, Mom! Jesus Christ! I know the difference! Chill out!” At this point, we were so sick of hearing that video games/violent movies/comic books/rap music was ruining our fragile little minds…that Mortal Kombat became even more of an obsession! If for no other reason than to relieve the frustration of having them working so hard to try to destroy something that we loved.

NOBODY was killing anybody over Mortal Kombat in the 90’s! Nobody! Not one police officer went into Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment and said, “Ah HA!!! He was playing Mortal Kombat! THAT’S why he turned cannibal!” That’s just ridiculous!

But…they sounded the alarms anyway, and the big protests began, and…they LOST! LOL! All of them lost so bad!

GOOD!!! There’s theft, rape, genocide, starvation, and government corruption, going on in the world! Fight that! Leave our entertainment alone!

Mortal Kombat has continued to be a major staple of the video gaming industry, and I assume that it always will be. However, if you think that it’s anything like the, now considered tame, fatalities and gore of what got people’s panties in a bunch before…LOL!!! You’d be sadly mistaken! What you see in these games now is SO over the top, that those early 90’s parents would probably VOMIT over what can be done to your opponents NOW!

I never ever thought that Mortal Kombat would come this far! What started off as a really cool game with a ‘kill your enemy’ gimmick attached, has evolved into a highy evolved character based story that has lasted over 25 years, and continues to shock and surprise gamers with each new chapter! Including the newest game, Mortal Kombat 11, which was just released a few weeks ago!

I was definitely one of the first to grab my copy…and it…is…INCREDIBLE!!!

I love playing the game, of course…I always have from day one…but the richness of these characters has really taken a hold of me over the years! It’s stuff like this that compels me to write stories of my own. If you know the mythology and the history behind everything that’s going on, you really get a feel and a new appreciation for the complex tapestry that’s being put on display here. Rivals become allies, allies become rivals, generations of struggle and strife and age old feuds, love affairs torn apart, time travel, and ancestors, and hidden secrets, and plot twists, and betrayals, and characters switching sides…it’s really something to behold if you see it in its entirety. Mortal Kombat is the “Game Of Thrones” of fighting game history!

And now…with the new technology and gaming systems that we have today? Mortal Kombat has reached an entirely new level of awesome! Like I said, I NEVER thought I’d see this back when I was a kid with a pocket full of arcade tokens and an early curfew! Hehehe!

But…here we are! And THIS is what Mortal Kombat looks like today…

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It’s been a long journey from the simple digital blood fest that we started off with, but it’s been one that I have enjoyed every single step of the way!

Will Mortal Kombat make it another 25+ years? I don’t see why it wouldn’t. It has yet to be dethroned from its spot as one of those games that changed the gaming landscape forever. So why not? With it’s rich character development and cringe worthy fatalities…I don’t see Mortal Kombat EVER going away!

Nowadays, blood and gore is pretty common in a lot of video games. And the need for going out to an arcade with your friends and a bunch of strangers on the weekends has been replaced with digital downloads into your system at home. But there was a time…a time when a teenaged Comsie was almost FAINT at the idea of a game that could could combine and adrenaline rush of action, the biggest iconic martial arts stars of our time, an interactive experience with my friends, a cheering crowd of kids in a dark room, and all the blood and guts of a HORROR movie…into one amazing video game!

(Starts to sing…”These are a few of my favorite things…” Hehehe!)

So check the game out if you get a chance! I absolutely LOVE it! And get to know some of the characters and their fighting styles down below…as well as some of the most GRUESOME fatalities that Mortal Kombat has ever created!

Keep going strong! And I’ll get right back in line for Mortal Kombat 12 when it comes!!!

Seezya later! And remember…if you’ve got to kill somebody…kill them with a sense of humor!

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Published May 12, 2019