Trendsetters: The 10 Most Significant Games

8/26/2008 6:16 PM | 9 Comments | Page 9 of 10

Mortal Kombat
(Midway Games, though this game appeared on many systems, it is the SEGA Genesis and Super NES versions that are most applicable, 1993)

"Mortal Kombat is a great game, but it was rather violent and people started complaining about the violence; but it was a great game," says Minoru Arakawa. Arakawa should know. Under his watch, Nintendo was embroiled in a national controversy that started with Mortal Kombat.

Obviously Mortal Kombat was the first fighting game, it came after Street Fighter II ignited the fighting game genre -- and Capcom could hardly have released a game called Street Fighter II without first releasing an original Street Fighter. The arcade version of Mortal Kombat came out in 1992, eight years after Nihon Bussan released Karate Champ and 13 years after Vectorbeam released Warrior, the top-down view fighting game generally accepted as the first entry in the fighting games genre.

Mortal Kombat added violent Easter eggs to the fighting game phenomenon. Put in the right code at the right time and you could freeze and shatter your opponents or harpoon them. Then there were the fatalities. But the first version of Mortal Kombat was only in the arcades, enabling it to fly in under the radar of most watch groups.

When the first home versions of Mortal Kombat appeared for SEGA Genesis and Super NES, however, that caught some attention. When one of his aids took Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut to a store to see the game, Lieberman was incensed. And so began the 1993 joint hearings on videogame violence.

"Mortal Kombat became the poster child for sophisticated games that do not belong in the hands of kids," says Dr. David Walsh of the National Institute on Media and the Family. "It became an example that people could really relate to that the technology had improved to the point where the graphic violence was inappropriate for children."

Not all versions of Mortal Kombat were created equal. Nintendo, a company that prided itself on creating family-friendly games, made Midway remove the blood and fatalities from the Super NES version of Mortal Kombat. SEGA, a company that rebuilt itself with an edgy image, left the violence untouched. The Genesis version of Mortal Kombat outsold the Super NES version three-to-one.

And then came the hearings. As Dr. Walsh points out, Mortal Kombat became the poster child of excessive game violence, but Night Trap got its share of attention. In the beginning, Nintendo looked like a white knight pointing out that the lack of fatalities in the Super NES version of MK; but once the floodgates were opened, the critics found reasons to complain about the Big N as well.

The hearings resulted in the game industry seeking its own lobbying group -- the Interactive Digital Software Association (later named the Entertainment Software Association). The hearings resulted in the game industry voluntarily accepting a rating system -- largely so that the government would not impose one, so the Entertainment Software Rating Board is also an outgrowth of the flap caused by Mortal Kombat.

"Having such an example led to a whole new level of awareness and led to what eventually became the ratings, the ESRB, videogames becoming a hot topic for some politicians," says Dr. Walsh.