ohOn December 9, 1993, Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman sat before a congressional hearing on violence in video games and told attendees that the video game industry had crossed a line. The focus of their ire was Mortal Kombat, Midway’s bloody fighting game, recently released on the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo Entertainment System after a successful run in arcades. “Blood splashes from the contestants’ heads,” he told the room. “The game’s narrator instructs the player to finish off their opponent. That player can choose a method of murder ranging from ripping out a heart or ripping off the opponent’s head, with the spinal cord attached.”
Lieberman’s goal with the congressional hearing had been to force the American gaming industry to create a formal rating system, preventing minors from purchasing violent titles. It succeeded (the Entertainment Software Rating Board was established as a result of the hearing) but it also fueled a moral panic that had quietly begun with the release of the arcade game Mortal Kombat in 1992. This then took on more urgency following the home console’s high-profile launch on September 13, 1993: a simultaneous global release to Midway called Mortal Monday. American news networks were sending reporters to the gambling hallsinterrogating the teenagers as they enthusiastically dismembered each other’s combatants. The newspapers interviewed alarmed child psychologists. The BBC responded introducing the game on his late-night news show The Late Show, calling on author Will Self to play live in the studio.
It’s interesting now to look at those audiences and then look at the game they described. Released this week, Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is an anthology of the first four titles in the series, in arcade format and on various home consoles, as well as a series of spin-offs for Game Boy Advance and PlayStation. The original titles are almost quaint relics of ’90s teen culture. The digitized footage, created by filming actors performing martial arts moves and then converting that footage into 2D sprite animations, is charmingly choppy and low-resolution, and the controversial kills are more gory fun than terrifying. Brilliantly, Kollection comes with a Fatality Trainer that allows you to easily access and practice each title’s viscera-studded death moves. If this mode had been available at the time, it would probably be the only thing I would have played.
Returning to play now, the game is obviously a product of twenty-somethings raised on ’80s horror movies. Midway had originally assembled a four-man team, including coder Ed Boon and John Tobias, to produce a combat action game starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. However, when that deal fell through, Boon and Tobias envisioned a competitor to Capcom’s breakout hit Street Fighter II, inspired by the wave of popular hyperviolent martial arts films like Bloodsport and Best of the Best. Boon’s pitch was “the MTV version of Street Fighter,” and deaths cropped up throughout the development process, the team pulling ideas from their favorite movies: RoboCop, Terminator, and Enter the Dragon. Immediately, the company knew that blood and guts would mean notoriety, and no one batted an eyelid. Talking to Polygon in 2022said Boon, “If there was something we would say, ‘Is this going too far?’ our CEO said, ‘No, go even further.’ Furthermore we had [Midway game designer] Eugene Jarvis as our mentor […] I had just made Narc, which was a pretty violent game in itself. So, if anything, they encouraged us to go. even further.”
Indeed, the moral panic over Mortal Kombat was to the early 1990s what the controversy over video nasties was to the early 1980s. It was the fear that new entertainment technologies would creep unchecked into family homes and poison the minds of children. It also ensured the success of the series. Mortal Kombat became the best-selling game of the holiday season and beyond, shipping six million copies across multiple machines. What Kollection shows is how adaptable the games have been, bringing the original arcade concept to portable platforms and then into the 32-bit console era, where spin-offs Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces expanded into the action-adventure genre.
For the industry itself, the Mortal Kombat panic simply became a new front on which to wage the console war. Sega took advantage of the controversy and allowed Mega Drive owners to access all the gore of the arcade version by entering a “secret” code. On the contrary, Nintendo sought to reinforce its family image by eliminating deaths and turning game blood into gray “sweat.” As expected, it was the Sega version that sold the best.
There have been many media panics since this one. Doom remained a tabloid fixture throughout the 1990s, becoming inextricably linked with the Columbine school shooting due to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s interest in the game. Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty were common targets during the 2010s, and more recently Fortnite has been accused of leading a generation of schoolchildren. in addiction. But the sight of Joe Lieberman in that wood-paneled Senate chamber depicting gruesome images from Mortal Kombat, as well as Night Trap and Lethal Enforcers, retains its unique fascination.
This was a turning point for the games business: it was the era in which the focus shifted from children to teenagers, from abstract puzzles and platforms to graphically rich shooters, gory fighting games, and adult-oriented action adventures. Midway set out to find out exactly what he could get away with. The response shaped the entire industry.
