History

Mortal Kombat is a best-selling series of fighting games created by Ed Boon and John Tobias. Mortal Kombat began as a series of arcade games, which were picked up by Acclaim Entertainment for the home console versions. Now Midway Games exclusively creates home versions of Mortal Kombat. It is especially noted for its digitized sprites (which differentiated it from its contemporaries’ hand-drawn sprites), and its high levels of blood and gore, including, most notably, its graphic fatalities—finishing moves, requiring a sequence of buttons to perform, which, in part, led to the creation of theESRB. The series itself is also known for replacing the hard c sound with the letter K, thus deliberately misspelling the word “combat,” as well as other words with the hard c sound (example: “klose” quarters instead of “close” quarters).

Brief history

The original Mortal Kombat was developed as a response to the popular Capcom fighting game Street Fighter II, with digitized graphics of actors, as opposed to animated cartoon graphics. Critics said the game’s graphic violence was only included in order to generate a public outcry and controversy that would gain publicity for the game (the level of violence in Street Fighter is considerably lower, getting an unrestricted “Teen” rating as opposed to a restricted “Mature” rating) . Although highly controversial, the mix of realism and violence propelled Mortal Kombat to widespread and historic renown.

Throughout the series, the game was known for its over-the-top violence which included fatalities, uppercuts that sprayed blood and launched players into the air, its theatrical special moves, as well as a tendency to replace instances of the hard c sound with the letter “K” in its written lexicon, including the title.

Via Wikipedia