On a day in May of this year, two thousand and twenty-three, I arose from my nightly slumber and rolled over to snooze the alarm on my phone for the first of what would be three to five times more. Upon the final snooze’s ending, when I’ve mustered enough will to drag my husk from the warmth and safety of my bed and face another day of drudgery, I grab my phone from it’s nighttime home on my nightstand and retreat to the bathroom to take care of business (five years on a vegan diet makes this surprisingly regular and dependable) and to start the onslaught of digital screen infusion for my brain, assuring I spend no time away from the highly orchestrated manipulation of my phone’s electric sex.
“What’s this,” I ponder, as my curated news feed plops some juicy info into my early morning life?
There’s a new Mortal Kombat game being released in September of this year. The news comes with a trailer boasting it’s promise of a full on, blood and guts good time. However, instead of being the obviously next numbered game in the series, that being “12” at this point, it’s calling itself “Mortal Kombat 1,” a bold declaration of rebooting and refreshing the series.
As a fighting game enthusiast, or what I like to call myself, a “Super Turbo Casual,” I’m excited by this announcement and supposed restart. My fighting game preference is most definitely on the Street Fighter side of the spectrum, with it’s fast-paced gameplay, finger-rolling game inputs, cartoonishly bright presentation, and it’s collection of world warrior characters. That’s my fucking jam, as the youths would say, but I’ve always had a soft spot pummeled in to my heart by Mortal Kombat’s outrageous dedication to excessive blood, guts, and gore. A rekindling of the franchise might be just what the blood-spattered doctor ordered and reminds me of my first encounter with the franchise.
Circa nineteen hundred ninety to nineteen hundred ninety-three, my father spent his Wednesday nights among a group of other adults, rolling heavy resin balls down a long, wooden alleyway at a collection of ten, white-painted pins minding their own business. A “bowling league,” it was called. Likely needing the alone time my mother suggested my father bring me and my younger brother along and thusly, we were a weekly fixture at the local bowling alley for league night.
Being a mere 10-12 years old, and not a participant of any bowling league, what were two young boys meant to do with their time aside from absorb the clingy musk of a thousand cigarette’s smoke and imbibe the highest form of culinary delicacies, bowling alley pizza and hot dogs? Well, this pin hall had an arcade.
An arcade, in those days, was typically a dingy room sectioned off in some larger business’s building like a movie theater, or a shopping mall, or in this case, a bowling alley. In the arcade room was a collection of large, free-standing machines each containing a TV screen and one single video game made controllable by the various buttons and joysticks attached to the front of the machine. Each arcade machine was made operable by inserting a twenty-five cent, round, flat, metal disc in to the front of the machine. This toll would guarantee you one to three minutes of gameplay, which was relished by the participant because at the time arcades were where all the best video games existed.
To keep us occupied my father would provide us with three American dollars worth of twenty-five cent discs, an amount we informed him “would barely last ten minutes,” the average length of blowing league nights being precisely thirteen hours long. He scoffed at our pleas and retorted “well, you better make it last.”
To the alley’s credit, and in an obvious need to coral the increasingly roaming horde of children bowlers brought along with them while they spent the night sucking down pitchers of Budweiser Light beer and smoking up a storm, they began offering movie nights for three dollars, including soda, popcorn, and a pre-selected film, shown on a TV in the bowling alley’s dark and cramped “party room.”
The choice was up to us; three dollars for the arcade or go to the party room movie night. Sometimes we chose the movie. It’s how I was introduced to such cinematic classics like “Mac and Me,” the tale of a wayward extraterrestrial and spontaneous McDonald’s restaurant dance-offs, “The Wizard,” the five hour long, Fred Savage starring, Super Mario Brothers Three commercial, and what I’m sure was some poor bowling alley employee’s misunderstanding at the video rental store, the murderous adventures of a pint-sized gold chaser, “Leprechaun.”
More often than not we chose the arcade. Many an hour was spent there, pumping quarter after quarter into arcade classics like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series of run and punch beat ‘em ups, traditional classics like mister and missus PacPeople, or the recently crowned king of the arcades, fucking Street Fighter II, whom, unbeknownst to us, was about to have it’s crown challenged.
Also to the alley’s credit, they kept the arcade freshly stocked with the latest hip and happening games. Upon entering the hazy, smoke-filled, electric cacophony of the arcade one Wednesday evening I saw a large mass of bodies huddled around one arcade machine. As I said, new machines were no surprise but none had previously garnered such a crowd around it. I made my way into the crowd to see what all the fuss was about. There, on the screen, were two, what appeared to be ninjas, one blue, one yellow. Each was controlled by a young, intensely focused boy, punching and kicking at each of their digital bodies. A new fighting game had appeared, it’s blood red colored arcade cabinet proclaiming it as “Mortal Kombat.”
Sure, this was most definitely a fighting game, but it didn’t look like a fighting game. Instead of brightly colored, pixel based characters like Street Fighter II or Fatal Fury had, these characters appeared to be live-action, living people in costumes, shrunk down and trapped inside the arcade screen. The colors were darker, grittier, more “real.” As the fighting ninjas engaged each other in fisticuffs I noticed what I assumed were the characters names atop the screen, under their diminishing life bars. “Sub Zero,” the left said said. “What the fuck does th-,” but before I could finish my thought the blue ninja released a blast of ice, Hadouken style, from his hands, freezing the yellow ninja in place, giving the blue player ample time to mosey on over and deliver a mighty crouching uppercut sending the frozen ninja sailing in to the air amidst an explosion of blood.
The crowd was stupefied.
There was no blood, not like that, not that free flowing, in Street Fighter II. Recovering from the attack, the yellow ninja responded by throwing a long rope with a jagged spear tip attached to the frontend of it, impaling Sub Zero through the midsection. Before I could process what I was seeing, the arcade machine boomed out in an almost deafening voice “GET OVER HERE,” and yellow, using his spear rope, whipped Sub Zero towards him with blinding speed, promptly delivering an equally brutal uppercut that sent Sub Zero and his blood hurtling in to the air. I glanced to the upper right corner. The name “Scorpion” appeared, as if the game was saying “duh,” to me.
The mass of gobsmacked onlookers gasped in a horrified kind of glee, completely unaware of what was yet to come.
As the battle raged on eventually Sub Zero claimed victory over Scorpion, but somehow the fight wasn’t over. Scorpion’s digital body wobbled back and forth in a daze as the game loudly announced “FINISH HIM,” simultaneously as the words appeared in bright blood red on the screen. “Finish him?” What the fuck did that mean? Finish him how? What was even happening here?
The Sub Zero player flicked the joystick back and forth, sauntered up to Scorpion’s helpless body, musically tapped a few buttons on the their side of the arcade, and…
Fucking ripped Scorpion’s head clean from his body, holding it aloft, his spinal column dangling in the wind.
Holy. Fuck.
I stood, eyes wide like the rest of the crowd, trying to comprehend the dazzling display of ultra violence I’d just witnessed only to come to the conclusion that I needed to play this game. Now.
And we all did. All night while our parents bowled away the evening, taking turns, trying out all the other characters, awash in the digital blood that was being set loose by the bucketful.
Eventually all the balls had been bowled and all the beers had been drunk and our parents came to drag us away, one by one from the display of bloody carnage, the best entertainment a twelve year old with three dollars worth of quarters could buy. Far better than watching “The Wizard,” where not a single head was torn from it’s body.