The arcade… dark, weird lighting. Gnarly carpeting. An omnipresent riot of sound and color as you walked in and wrapped yourself in the electronic arms of sweet, sweet diversion. For many of us RetroFans, it’s a golden, soft-glow set of memories we keep well-polished and stored within our minds’ more secure vaults. Some of us were around in the late 70s and early 80s, when titles like Space Invaders and Donkey Kong were waving the banner of arcade gaming’s golden age. More of us remember the era when arcades saw some shrinkage; my own formative exposure to the format was in the smaller realms tucked into the side areas of bowling alleys and the nooks of theme restaurants. The early 90s saw the Neo Geo and a host of other innovative releases, breathing some life into the old arcade room… but nonetheless, the sad truth is that the phenomenon has continued to deflate over time (except in Japan, where it’s kept vigorously alive).

I consider myself lucky to have been an awe-struck young man in my pre-pubescent years when the early 90s brought us a small revival of the arcade. My venues were still within the greater confines of bowling alleys and Chuck E Cheeses, but the games we were playing in those places made it feel like its own circus… its own arena. Everyone can think of a couple off the top of their heads, and while I’ve already had the honor of discussing the gems like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II, I hope a few of you will recall the games I’ll highlight in this article. Many are both bizarre and wonderful, like our first childhood crush or that recurring dream we had about MC Hammer growing to Godzilla size and destroying our hometown with his brutal dance moves (was that just me?), but it didn’t stop us from throwing quarters or tokens in to give them a shot.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Developer: Midway

Released: October 31, 1991

Everyone just about lost their shit when the Terminator sequel came out. At least that’s what I remember. It had a good-guy Terminator, an even worse bad guy Terminator, and more catastrophic violence than a train wreck giving birth to a nuclear detonation with no epidural. Even though it was way rated R, we all did what we had to do to see it, and whoa… it was nuts. It even sort of made Guns n Roses cool (who am I kidding, a lot of us misguidedly loved them anyway). On Halloween of ’91, we got to live the whole thing out in one of the better shooter-style arcade games of its time. The demo sequence claimed that the game was also rated R, for Righteous. No shit.

No need to label what specific type of weapons are in the crates. You’ll find out when you blast them open with all your gunpower. The enemy T-800 has gone so far as to ignore the hated humans behind it to focus on you, who are known as Machine Judas. SkyNet wept.

T2‘s difficulty was harsh, but it was still a blast to see how long you could last on the battlefields of 2029 against your loyalist robot kin and the massive death machines they served. Some of us even got really sharp and made it back to John Connor’s 1995… but I never did. Not even with 2 players. No matter what, the game’s graphics were super-crisp and it had a ton of really fun digitized voice clips in it. I for one couldn’t help but get into it.

Captain America and the Avengers

Developers: Data East, Realtime Associates

Released: 1991

This is one I dutifully played the absolute shit out of. I was huge into superheroes as a kid, both Marvel and DC (but a little more Marvel, and I’ve never been able to fully articulate why), and I was thrilled to see The Avengers when it first arrived at the smoky bowling alley my family frequented. They wanted to bowl? That’s fine, suckers are born every minute. I wanted to stop the fucking Red Skull.

Vision and Hawkeye stand fascinated as Mandarin shows them his special squat thrusts for keeping his glutes “mandariffic.” Captain America, always the histrionic one, shows off his vertical leap. Iron Man stares at nothing, thinking about his offshore accounts.

While the ports of the game got mixed reception, the arcade version itself is often praised as a classic beat ’em up. I liked it because four of us disinterested junior bowlers could play at a time, and I could play as Vision, whom I found fascinating as a superhero. The team plows through an army of generic robots and lesser villains to chase after the Red Skull, even making a foray into space and some other bizarre places in the Marvel Universe. Each character has melee and ranged options, and you can even hoist a motherfucker and throw him into another motherfucker. That was my go-to move. The graphics were great, fitting the comic book source material wonderfully; the sound and music was almost honest-to-god inspiring. “AMERICA STILL NEEDS YOUR HELP!” Well shit, I’d better pop some more tokens in.

WWF WrestleFest

Developer: Technos Japan

Released: 1991

“Jesus, dude, shut up about all these goddamned wrestling games!” No, though, because this one is incredible. You don’t even have to be a wrestling fan to get into it. Technos had released WWF Superstars in ’89, which did pretty well, and they took everything they learned from that in ’91 and produced an incredible mat-fighting arcade game.

Ultimate Warrior adds “slapped half-dead by a fat guy” to his resume, while Hogan and half of each featured tag team use Mr Perfect as a boat to cross an imaginary Potomac. Hogan, of course, is Washington!

The legendary Road Warriors/Legion of Doom are the “boss” characters in this one, replacing Andre the Giant and Ted DiBiase in Superstars. You can team up with a friend or go it alone in various match types, but it was easily the most fun to try for the tag team titles against Hawk and Animal (who were fucking impossible to beat unless you had a grocery bag full of change). Team-up moves, berserk tag-ins, and digitized announcing from Mike McGuirk and Gene Okerlund make this a bona fide classical-era WWF product. The graphics are a little goofy, but they’re good for the format; the action doesn’t suffer. While the actual “Sport” may be choreographed or pre-determined, WWF WrestleFest isn’t short on real entertainment.

Lethal Enforcers

Developer: Konami

Released: October 8th, 1992

This time period was also all about controversy. Lethal Enforcers didn’t become quite as notorious as games like Doom or Mortal Kombat, but it did cause quite a stir upon its release. Konami’s action-cop shooter game had photo-realistic graphics (for its time) and was somewhat intense. It didn’t matter to the self-appointed moral crusaders of the era if you were the good guy or not; they were pissed that you were shooting at an animation of an actor dressed as a stereotypical goon.

Aside form all that, the game is immersive and pulse pounding. Split second decisions must be made as you confront thugs with hostages, fleeing civilians, and lightning fast criminals. You can easily lose the game, in fact, if you’re not precisely accurate in order to avoid harming the innocent. There’s chase scenes, power-ups that give you guns the police definitely shouldn’t have, and even “training stages” that lighten things up while still maintaining the theme. Aside from the great visuals, the music kicks ass and Lethal Enforcers is another game that heavily incorporates digitized samples. I liked this one enough to get the Genesis version a couple years later, and it was pretty faithful to the source.

Virtua Fighter

Developer: Sega (Sega AM2)

Released: October 1993

You were wondering why I was studiously avoiding fighting games in this particular article… I was saving this one for last. With the dawn of Virtua Fighter, the whole playing field of the genre was changed. Virtua Fighter wasn’t just showing us 3D polygon-based graphics, which we still considered pretty far-out and futuristic; the revolutionary fighter was making an earnest (and effective) attempt at fluid realism in its characters’ moves and techniques.

The “Model 1” hardware rig used for the game was jointly developed by Sega and Lockheed Martin. Yes, Lockheed fucking Martin the aerospace firm. The people who have a knee-deep resume of building cutting edge military technology. This hardware not only handles the revolutionary 3D rendering, but also allows for stunningly realistic movement and nearly true-to-life physics. The game’s plot was minimal and loosely resembled those of its ancestors, but literally no one cared. The game has spawned a thriving franchise that has continued to break ground in its genre. I remember seeing this shit and thinking to myself, “it’s pretty cool to live in the future.”

Towards the middle of the decade, the phenomenon of the arcade took a sullen plunge once more, though it’s remained alive through the 00’s and 10’s (or at least its heart beats). Our friends in the far East keep things going, and there’s of course been a small resurgence here as the retro gaming movement has gotten wind under its wings.

Between the years that the market drank Atari, and the years of the rise of the sons of Sony… there was an age undreamed of.

Thank you for reading! See you in June! Stay Retro!

In the early 1990s, the gaming industry was truly on a roll. Graphics were becoming better and better. New ideas were blossoming like flowers on a sunny hillside. Every month, magazines like GamePro showed us new titles and systems on the horizon. The future was bright, and we had our shades on. However, there were also hassles to deal with. Most notable was the conflict over violence and censorship. This issue polarized people, both video gamers and the uninitiated. I’ve written about some of the seminal FPS (first-person shooter) games, like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, that rose to the top among all this dynamic energy. However, there also emerged a titan amongst fighting games during this era… brutally violent… action packed… and gory beyond belief.

The hallmark of any dignified martial arts tournament… a trophy for the victor!

I felt that the original Mortal Kombat was a fitting subject for October, not because it has monsters or wizards in it… but because of all that blood. Released by Midway, Mortal Kombat took the fighter genre by the short-and-curlies, writing a new set of rules and causing a true uproar after its October 1992 release. The game created new standards, became a source of rumor and controversy, and even helped shape games as we know them today.

From left to right down the line: Johhny Cage, Kano, Raiden (spelled Rayden in the home console versions), Liu Kang, Scorpion, Sub-Zero, and Sonya. I know this selection looks small, but trust me, the sequels add plenty more to choose from.

In Mortal Kombat, you play one of seven fighters chosen from Earth to compete in Shang Tsung’s tournament. His champion, the four-armed half-dragon Goro, hasn’t been defeated in 500 years. Each playable character has their own reasons (some intertwined) for competing and wanting to win. For instance, Sonya is after Kano, and Scorpion seeks revenge on Sub-Zero, while Liu Kang (my personal favorite) just wants to defeat Shang Tsung and bring honor back to the ancient tournament. The plot, like those of most fighting games, takes a backseat, however. Mortal Kombat is mostly about the action, and it delivers. MK’s control scheme was (and still is) more or less unique; five buttons control punches and kicks (both high and low) as well as a block that thwarts your enemy’s strikes. Unlike Street Fighter II and the other competition of the era, every MK character’s regular moves are very similar. Everyone can sweep kick, jump kick, and uppercut… and they all look about the same doing it, and they all do it as well as their peers. The special moves are where you start to see the differences. Many are simply projectiles; Kano, Johnny Cage, Sonya, Liu Kang, and Raiden all have one. Others include Sub-Zero’s freeze attack, Scorpion’s iconic “GET OVER HERE” harpoon, and Liu Kang’s pummeling bicycle kick. Most of the moves are fun and don’t require a surgeon’s hands to pull off effectively, which is nice if you’re not an expert at fighting-style games. However, the same cannot be said for the fatalities.

And fatal they are. A big chunk of what sparked the game’s pet controversy, fatalities are special moves performed on a helpless, defeated opponent. You see, the matches are best-of-three. If you win the second or third round (and therefore the match), a voice calls out “FINISH HIM!” and as Scorpion’s all too glad to demonstrate below…

He likes his well-done, thank you. 

…and that one’s pretty tame. Spines, guts, hearts, it doesn’t matter; everything’s getting ripped out or off. Nothing is safe.

Players can battle one another ad infinitum, but the winner of such matches will continue on the in-game tournament ladder between challenges from other players. After defeating the other participants in the tournament (singly and then 2-on-1), you are confronted by none other than the champion, Goro. While he’s very strong and even quick, Goro suffers the downfall of so many big brutes in pop culture: he’s just not that clever. Careful exploitation of his size and other limits can help a well-honed fighter bring him down. Once Goro is defeated, there is but one final match… against the shapeshifting, floating evil wizard Shang Tsung. It’s as challenging as it sounds, unless you’re lightning-quick and razor-sharp.

Many encounters with the mighty Goro begin and end like this.

 In addition to the normal foes you face, doing certain things a certain way at certain times can bring around Reptile, a secret hidden character who combines the moves of Sub-Zero and Scorpion. It isn’t necessary to beat Reptile to finish the game, but it’s certainly something for the completion nerds to quest after. Less cryptic is the “Test Your Might” minigame, where button-mashing helps you build up the strength to smash through various materials (from wood to diamond) and add points to your score.

Sure, no big deal for a god of thunder. Let’s see if the undead ninja can do it…

The game’s graphics are stellar for reasons similar to 1993’s Doom: lots of the art is digitized photography or meticulously crafted digital art. As you will see in parts of the behind-the-scenes video below, every fighter was posed and scanned into the game using a painstaking (and long) process.

The Sound is all digital too, with plenty of screams and howls to further depict the agony of martial arts mayhem. There is music, but it is very appropriately low-key during gameplay. It mostly consists of heavy drums and orchestra hits, the kind of music you’d expect when two people decide to beat the shit out of each other in the 1990s. However, an official album was released in 1994, with a theme for each character as well as other music inspired by the game.

Along with many of its contemporaries in the early 90s, Mortal Kombat came under fire in the conflict between concerned parents and anti-censorship interests.  Mortal Kombat was one of the games examined during the 1992-93 hearings held by senators Joseph Lieberman and Herb Kohl regarding concerns over video game violence. The game came under special scrutiny due to the combination of realistic-looking characters and “excessive” gore. Ultimately, this led to several of its console system ports having the blood removed (although a code could get you blood in the Genesis version). In addition, the arcade version had been designed with a dipswitch to turn the blood on and off so the game could be used in multiple types of environments without issues. None of the controversy hurt Mortal Kombat’s popularity as a game or as a franchise; two sequels were out by 1995, as well as a film and even some action figures (made by Hasbro, in the exact style of GI Joe figures). The original game and its sequels were ported to nearly every home or portable system of the time period, with even the Game Boy getting a version. Some of these were missing the blood and/or a couple of characters, but they were mostly playable.

I give Mortal Kombat 9 stars out of 10. It’s archaic now, but when it erupted onto the scene in 1992, it changed EVERYTHING. It’s always been one of my personal favorites, both this individual game and the series as a whole.

Now for some fun trivia!

Actor and martial artist Daniel Pesina portrays three (four) different characters in the game: Johnny Cage, Scorpion, and Sub-Zero (and thus, by extension, Reptile). Ho Sung Pak plays not only Liu Kang, but also the main villain, Shang Tsung. The ninja suit used to capture Sub-Zero and Scorpion’s moves was red, not blue or yellow. As a neat side note, Ho Sung Pak  also worked on the TMNT films in various roles.

According to interviews and other sources, the game was originally supposed to be very different and revolve around Jean-Claude Van Damme, popular 1990s martial-arts movie star. Since Van Damme was already involved in a similar project (which was never made), the concept was changed dramatically, but the idea to digitize the actors was retained. Character Johnny Cage is loosely based off Van Damme, and his signature split-plus-groin-punch move is an homage to the film “Bloodsport.”

Reptile sparked rumors of another hidden character, a red ninja called Ermac. His existence was theorized about due to the diagnostics menu “ERMACS” (error macros) that would show up on the game’s debug screen. Midway said nothing on the issue for a long time… but added just such a character in a later game (Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3).

The Sega Genesis version was bloodless unless you pressed A-B-A-C-A-B-B at the start. It was given an MA-13 rating. The Sega CD version was fully uncensored, which earned it an MA-17 rating. Along with the Splatterhouse sequels, this game was among the first titles that Sega rated with its own system shortly before the ESRB took full effect.

There’s more coming just before Halloween, RetroMonsters! We’ll close out the month by celebrating one of the true legends of horror gaming. See you then!