The evolution of the Mortal Kombat series

From the arcades to PlayStation 5, Mortal Kombat has changed in more ways than just adding more fatalities across the years.

The fighting game genre has many notable franchises. One of the earliest to earn iconic status is Mortal Kombat. It punched its way onto the arcade scene in 1992 and quickly found its way to the home console market, wowing players with at-the-time realistic visuals and controversial over–the–top gore. That controversial content ushered in the now-industry standard ratings system, but Mortal Kombat’s legacy has been defined by much more than that. For over 11 mainline installments, the series built gameplay innovations and an ever-growing roster atop its core 1-on-1 fighting system.

Ahead of the series returning to–and recreating–its “roots” with Mortal Kombat 1, now is an amazing time to look at how it evolved through the eras. Arcades were shaken to their core when Mortal Kombat hit the scene in 1992. The series takes characters from across the realms to fight and test their might in a martial arts tournament. It’s unveiled that the tournament is an ancient ritual to stop a half-dragon warlord of an otherworldly realm from invading and conquering Earth. Our fate lies in the hands of a martial arts prodigy, a special forces agent, and a movie star in way over his head. The series shifts toward full-on wars between the realms, time-traveling shenanigans, and alternate-timeline insanity. Making MK home to one of the wildest and most entertaining story rides in gaming.

Unlike its brethren fighting series, Mortal Kombat used a more realistic aesthetic with digitized graphics to create the cast of the game instead of the then-popular sprite work. This and the gore of the game stole the show, making Mortal Kombat stand out from the competition. Thanks to the game’s “Fatality” finishers, complex inputs that’d activate a highly creative and overly gory animation as one kombatant finished off the other for good, the game quickly went down in ‘90s pop culture history, helping push the perceived need for a videogame age rating system.