Mortal Kombat

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History of Mortal Kombat

The development of Mortal Kombat started with a team of only four people. Based on the idea of a video game starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, it turned into a unique and innovative answer to the famous fighting game Street Fighter II and stranded away from the initial idea, coming out to be one of the most popular fighting games in the genre's history and a best-selling game of the time.

The game features round-based one-on-one matches where the player's goal is to deplete the opponent's health bar controlling one of the available characters. The distinguishable feature of the game is its unique control scheme. It was the first game to introduce special moves executable exclusively using the joystick. It also introduced the Fatality, a finishing move, performed in a gruesome fashion. Generally, the amount of gore and extreme violence has sparked much controversy and introduction of age-specific content ratings for video games.

Among the innovations introduced by this game was also a change to the blocking system, which allowed much more versatile counterattacks. Mortal Kombat introduced a concept of "juggling" (executing a combination of attacks on the knocked up enemy), which was used in many other games later on.

Mortal Kombat was first released as an arcade game and ported later to various consoles including the Amiga, Snes, Megadrive and the PC. There are many titles in the series, released in the timeline between 1992 and 2012. Besides the fighting games, there are three spin-offs, created in the genre of action-adventure games. Incredible popularity of the series allowed production of various non-game media, such as films, comic books and television series.

The game currently remains one of the most well-known and loved titles in the fighting games genre and is considered a permanent classic.

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