The First Time I Ever Played Mortal Kombat
I remember spending alot of time in the arcade. The wooden floors were covered in sand from people dragging it in on their feet and the place had a beach like smell to it. There was a huge variety of games and it was pretty loud from all the different sounds coming from them. I never got bored of that place.
On one particular day when I walked in, I heard some sounds from a game that sounded different than usual coming from the back. It sounded like a fighting game. When I got to the back there was a new arcade game that stuck out to me. It was Mortal Kombat. I watched a couple of older kids playing it and even as a little kid I was thinking "holy shit this looks awesome!" I had never really seen those kind of digitized graphics. From then on I played it every time we went to Shenandoah Acres.
Mortal Kombat was developed by Midway and originally released in arcades in August of 1992. It was then released on home consoles a little over a year later in September of 1993 and would also get several ports.
I remember one weekend my parents took my cousin and I to rent it from the video store. I had a Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) at the time so that was the console we played it on. The thing that was a little disappointing though was that the SNES version didn't have blood in it and the fatalities weren't as violent. Later on I would find out that the Sega Genesis version had a blood code that you could put in but I didn't own a Genesis at the time, I would play that one at a friends house. Back then I had met a friend in karate class that also loved Mortal Kombat and we would talk about it all the time.
My favorite characters to play as were Sub-Zero and Scorpion. I've always liked the ninja characters in Mortal Kombat games. I would study their moves and fatalities until I could do them because I had a hard time with them at first.
Playable Characters
Johnny Cage
Kano
Raiden
Liu Kang
Sub-Zero
Scorpian
Sonya
Each fighter has different abilities and fatalities.
My favorite stage to play on was the pit stage because you could knock the other player into a pit of spikes. I thought that was crazy.
When you play single player mode there is an arcade ladder called Battle Plan. You will select your character and then go through several matches. You will fight through 7 matches against other characters and on the 7th it will be a mirror match. Then you will go onto 3 endurance matches before facing Goro and the final boss Shang Tsung.
Goro is really powerful and has four arms so I would just try to defeat him with jump kicks. Shang Tsung had the ability to morph into other characters.
Mortal Kombat turned me into a huge fan and collector of the franchise. I've collected the games, comics, sountracks, figures, movies and etc. I eventually got a Mortal Kombat tattoo as well.
Photos of some of my collection.
I still play the original pretty often and when I do it reminds me of being back at Shenandoah Acres playing it in the arcade with that beach like smell and sand under my feet.
