Put Barbie in Mortal Kombat

Graeme Virtue on Mortal Kombat's guest stars. 

Liu Kang wins! Fatality! For a game lovingly constructed around the fantasy of bare-knuckle fighting to the actual death, Mortal Kombat has turned out to be surprisingly resilient. (Similarly unkillable? That techno banger from the first movie).

This month, more than 30 years after the original game debuted as an arcade cabinet in 1992, the 12th installment will come out swinging on all major consoles. The slightly weird title of Mortal Kombat 1 hints that it's intended as a soft reboot to lure new or lapsed players (the second attempt at a franchise reset since Warner Bros acquired the franchise in 2009).

Mortal Kombat has always been a one-on-one fighting game where you select a ripped avatar, then strive to punch, kick or fireball your opponent into submission. What secured its notoriety from the outset was the addition of blood, guts and gore, transforming it into a thrash-metal cover version of Street Fighter II.

Over the course of three decades, the Mortal Kombat mythos of a centuries-old tournament where the ultimate winner becomes inter-dimensional overlord has been expanded and reconfigured. The original USP, however, remains the same: a rad “fatality” move, in which you get to waste your opponent in such deliriously over-the-top fashion it is unclear whether you are supposed to laugh or recoil or both.

I have always enjoyed the knockabout soap opera of the main saga but some of the most interesting stuff has been happening in the margins. Since 2011, Mortal Kombat has been running its own lucrative side hustle, with developer NetherRealm Studios adding extra characters as downloadable content (DLC). The literal game-changer? They started poaching from other IP. Now for a few extra bucks, you could fight as—or against—notorious child murderer Freddy Krueger. With his jagged claws and goopy fizzog, Freddy fit right in with the gnarly Mortal Kombat roster. But why stop there?

GOOD GAME

NARRATIVE SUMMER