Rex Fatalis

Mortal Kombat was a game that demanded your
attention in 1992. Well, maybe not quite this
much.

Remember if you will the distant year of 1993, when the white-hot fighting game Mortal Kombat made its debut on home game consoles. We were all excited for its arrival, and pretended to be excited after taking the cartridge home and slapping it into our 16-bit systems of choice, but the sad reality is that neither the Genesis or Super NES ports met our expectations. 

See, there's your problem, Mac.

The Super NES game by Sculptured Software sure looked like the arcade game, taking full advantage of the system's lush 256 color palette, but the gameplay was kind of sluggish, and Nintendo's censorship turned the scarlet sprays of blood erupting from your opponent into brown clods of dirt. Meanwhile, the Genesis game by Probe was, well, by Probe. The fights were faster and the control was tighter than it had been on the Super NES, but there was a lack of panache to the presentation, with fewer voice samples, less detail in the backgrounds, and an appalling lack of color even by the system's humble standards. Even the heart Kano tore out of his opponent's chest seemed to phone it in, squirming around in his hand like a flabby fish eager to be put out of its misery.

For Super NES owners, the best cure for the Mortal Kombat blues was to wait for the sequel, an exceptional port of what's regarded by fans as the best game in the original trilogy. The inclusion of all the blood and gore from the arcade version wasn't going to make parents happy, but they weren't the ones playing the game. Things weren't so cut and dry for Genesis fans... Mortal Kombat II was only passable on that system, a victim of both the console's audiovisual limitations and a typically underwhelming conversion by Probe. Satisfaction would only arrive on the Genesis in 1995, when Sculptured Software brought an admittedly fugly but structurally solid port of Mortal Kombat 3 to the system.

The original game (left) vs. Master Linkuei's revision (right).
MKAE adds clouds overhead, as well as a more realistic
shade of blue-grey for its sky, as opposed to the turquoise
in the official release.

There were eventually alternatives to the first Mortal Kombat, but the original remained sadly lacking. Fortunately, a team of hackers led by Master Linkuei are determined to right past wrongs by giving Genesis owners the port of the original Mortal Kombat they should have gotten in the first place. Titled Mortal Kombat Arcade Edition, this conversion uses Probe's lackluster effort as a foundation, but builds onto it with more voice, meatier sound samples, and discernible stone surfaces where there was once smeared globs of pixels. 

Again, the original is on the left, and Master Linkuei's
revision is on the right. The kombatants seem to stand on
nothing in particular in Probe's game, while the new version
features a cracked stone floor with the skeleton of an
unlucky fighter lying in the foreground.

Mortal Kombat Arcade Edition still doesn't look as nice as the Super NES game, and it still has Matt Furniss' irritatingly wobbly soundtrack, but there are nevertheless abundant improvements over the official release. Fatalities now begin with a threatening musical dirge, there's better use of color, with fewer peach-colored pixels clinging to the edges of characters, and minor details like the clouds rolling past in the Pit stage and the lightning crackling around Raiden have returned. It adds impact and artistry to a game that felt alarmingly devoid of both when it first debuted.

Today, there are all kinds of ways to play the first Mortal Kombat thirty years after its debut, but if you insist on doing things the old-fashioned way with a 16-bit system, Mortal Kombat Arcade Edition is your best option. Now if only someone would do something about that dire Genesis conversion of World Heroes. What's that? Not a chance in hell? Well, it was worth a shot...