How Mortal Kombat (and its moral panic) changed the gaming world | games

HeyOn December 9, 1993, Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman sat before a congressional hearing on video game violence and told the audience that the video game industry had gone too far. The focus of his wrath is Mortal Kombat, Midway’s gory fighting game, which was recently released on the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo Entertainment System following its success in arcades. “Blood is spraying from the heads of the contestants,” he told the room. “The game narrator commands the player to eliminate his opponent. This player may choose a killing method that ranges from ripping out the opponent’s heart or pulling the opponent’s head out with the spinal cord tied.”

Lieberman’s goal for the congressional hearing was to force the US gaming industry to create an official rating system, and prevent minors from purchasing violent games. It worked — the Entertainment Software Rating Board was created as a result of the hearing — but it also fueled a moral panic that had begun quietly with the launch of the Mortal Kombat arcade game in 1992. It then took on more urgency after the high-profile home console release on September 13, 1993 — a midway simultaneous global launch dubbed Mortal Monday. American news networks would send their reporters into the hallways to interrogate teenagers as they enthusiastically dismembered each other’s fighters. Newspapers interviewed terrified child psychologists. The BBC responded by showing the game on its late-night news magazine program The Late Show, calling in author Will Self to play live in the studio.

Now it’s interesting to watch those hearings and then look at the game they were describing. Released this week, Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is an anthology of the first four titles in the series, in arcade and various home console formats, as well as a bunch of spin-offs for Game Boy Advance and PlayStation. The original titles are almost bizarre relics of ’90s teen culture. The digital visuals, created by filming actors performing martial arts moves and then converting that footage into 2D animation, are charmingly jerky and low-resolution, and the controversial deaths are more bloody entertaining than horrifying. It’s great that Kollection comes with a Fatality Trainer allowing you to easily access and practice the various death moves from each title. If this mode had been available at the time, it probably would have been the only thing I would have played.

Playing back now, it’s clear that the game is the product of twentysomethings who grew up on 80s horror films. Midway originally assembled a four-man team including programmer Ed Boon and John Tobias to produce a fighting action game starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. However, when that deal fell through, Boone and Tobias envisioned a competitor to Capcom’s hugely successful Street Fighter II, inspired by the wave of ultra-violent martial arts films like Bloodsport and Best of the Best. Boon’s elevator pitch was “MTV’s version of Street Fighter”, and fatalities appeared throughout the development process, with the team drawing ideas from their favorite films: RoboCop, Terminator, and Enter the Dragon. Immediately, the company realized that blood and guts would mean notoriety and no one was upset. Speaking to Polygon in 2022, Boone said: “If there’s one thing we could say: Is this too much?” Our CEO was like, “No, go further.” Well we had it [Midway game designer] Eugene Jarvis as our teacher […] He just did Narc, which was a pretty violent game in itself. So, if anything, we were encouraged to go until additional.”

In fact, the moral panic over Mortal Kombat in the early 1990s was what the infamous video controversies were in the early 1980s. It was about the fear that new entertainment technologies would enter family homes unchecked and poison children’s minds. It also ensured the success of the series. Mortal Kombat became the best-selling game of the Christmas season and beyond, with six million copies transferred across multiple consoles. What Kollection shows is how adaptable the games are, taking the original arcade concept to portable platforms and then into the 32-bit console era where Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces expanded into the action-adventure genre.

For the industry itself, the Mortal Kombat panic has simply become a new frontier for the console wars. Sega courted controversy, allowing Mega Drive owners to access the full gore of the arcade version by entering a “secret” code. In contrast, Nintendo sought to bolster its family-friendly image by removing deaths and turning the game’s blood into gray “sweat.” Not surprisingly, the Sega version was the best seller.

There have been several media panics since then. Doom remained a tabloid game throughout the entire 1990s, and became closely associated 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 regular targets throughout the 2000s, and more recently Fortnite was accused of leading a generation of school children into addiction. But the sight of Joe Lieberman in the wood-paneled Senate chamber describing gruesome images from Mortal Kombat — as well as Night Trap and Lethal Enforcers — retains its unique charm.

This was a turning point in gaming – it was the era in which the focus shifted from children to teenagers, from abstract puzzle games and platformers to graphically rich shooters, bloody fighting games and action adventures aimed at adults. Midway set out to find out exactly what she could get away with. The answer has shaped the entire industry.