Video games, thanks to human creativity, can take on various forms. They can be calming and relaxing, much like Journey and Stardew Valley, or as bloody and violent as the games in the Doom and Wolfenstein series.
However, only one game was so violent when it was released that it forced the US government to call for a regulating body to address it and its ilk.
That game is the first Mortal Kombat.
Mortal Kombat History, Features
Mortal Kombat is a 2D fighting game developed and published by Midway Games in 1992 for various arcades via cabinets, per the Mortal Kombat Wiki. Midway then ported the game to gaming consoles the year after, though with some changes.
The first Mortal Kombat, much like its contemporaries, featured people and oddities from other worlds fighting each other for various reasons. While the game's premise is simplistic, it does revolutionize some aspects of the fighting genre of video games.
These aspects involve a block button and changing how players perform special moves. It even introduced the concept of "juggling," keeping opponents in the air by continuous connecting attacks.
However, there is one concept that made Mortal Kombat a childhood fascination for many gamers at the time and a controversy for adults back then: fatalities.
The Controversy
Mortal Kombat is also the first game to allow players to execute their opponents in creative, but violent ways. Depending on the character they chose, players can rip their opponent's spine from their body, burn them alive, and even decapitate them.
The feature was a hit with children and adolescents at the time; back then, violence in video games was toned down since kids were its main demographic. The game used digitized graphics of real actors, giving it a more realistic feeling than its contemporaries, per Inverse.
Because of the realistic violence, along with other games that contributed to the controversy, members of the US Senate attempted to regulate the video games industry as the experience it gives was "negatively impacting children."
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The most prominent of these senators was Joe Lieberman, who took it upon himself to hold a press conference with other children's advocates, per Bloody Disgusting. Lieberman stated that the video game industry was marketing "extreme violence" to children based on statistics and that it teaches kids to glorify violence and enjoy inflicting "the most gruesome forms of cruelty imaginable."
The video game industry avoided government regulation by announcing it would create its own content rating system, which led to the formation of the Electronic System Ratings Board (ESRB) in 1994.
This board, according to its About Us page, is a non-profit, self-regulatory body for the video game industry that helps consumers - especially parents - make informed choices about the games their families play.
The ESRB's formation satisfied Congress, with the ESRB becoming the standard for the industry since. Politicians would mostly leave the video game industry alone up until the rise of microtransactions and loot boxes.
For Midway's part, it toned down Mortal Kombat's violence to follow the ESRB's rating, it censored in-game blood with gray-colored "sweat" in Mortal Kombat's Super Nintendo version. Gamers will need to buy the Sega version of the game to get the violent fatalities featured in the arcade.
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