Mortal Kombat

Mortal Kombat is the first game in the Mortal Kombat fighting game series by Midway. It was released in arcades in 1992. It centers on the first Mortal Kombat tournament (in Shang Tsung, Goro, & Rayden case they know it's actually the 10th tournament) and the ultimate defeat of the evil Shang Tsung by the monk Liu Kang.

The game was a response by Midway to Capcom's highly successful Street Fighter II, which spawned a number of fighting games. However, it used a distinctly different fighting system from the Street Fighter formula, which was used in all subsequent sequels until Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance. The controls consisted of five buttons arranged in an "X" pattern: a high punch, a high kick, a low punch, a low kick, and a block button, as well as an eight-way joystick. Unlike Street Fighter, characters did not block while retreating or crouching, but required pushing the block button to block. Even then, characters would take (reduced) damage from any hit while blocking. If the two fighters were standing next to each other, hitting any of the attack buttons would result in a different strike that was unblockable: a low punch turned into a throw, a high punch turned into a heavy elbow, headbutt or backhand, and either kick turned into a knee strike. Crouching and hitting either punch resulted in an uppercut, which was the heaviest strike of the game. Jump kicking and crouch-kicking were executed in a similar fashion to Street Fighter.

The game retained a similar scoring system (based on successful hits, the Test Your Might minigame and other bonuses) to those games; this would be dropped in later entries to the Mortal Kombat series in favor of counting wins.

Another of the game's innovations was the Fatality, a special finishing move executed against a beaten opponent to kill them in a gruesome fashion. For example, one character (Sub-Zero) would grasp a defeated opponent by the head, then rip off their head and spine while the body crumpled to the ground in a pool of blood. Fatalities could only be executed after you had defeated your opponent in combat, and essentially served as a memorable and gruesome sort of victory dance.

Mortal Kombat also introduced the concept of juggling, an idea so popular it has spread to many games and even other genres. Juggling takes advantage of the fact when a character is knocked into the air, that player is unable to control his or her character until he or she lands and gets up again. The idea behind juggling is to knock the enemy into the air and then follow up with other combat moves to keep them there. Theoretically, one could juggle one's opponent to death without ever taking damage, though this was difficult to accomplish in practice.

Finally, Mortal Kombat also changed the way special moves were performed. Street Fighter (and many other fighting games) performed most special moves in fractions of circles (usually full, half or one-quarter) on the joystick followed by a button press (such as a quarter-circle forward, plus punch). Mortal Kombat was the first to introduce moves that did not require a button press (such as tap back, tap back, then forward), and only a few of the special moves required circular joystick movement.