Mortal Kombat is an Action-Adventure, “Beat-em-Up” type of game, created by Midway in 1992, where you get to play as several characters in a Kung-Fu style of fighting. Each of these characters has certain signature moves and the biggest draw is each character’s type of “fatality” they can perform. A fatality is the character’s finishing move where they totally finish off an opponent. Fatalities with such names as “Scorpion’s Toasty”, “Soul Stealing”, “Hat Slice” and the “Spine Rip” were what led to the creation of the ESRB system. This system was more or less the icing on the cake as full Congressional hearings took place citing that video and arcade games had become too violent and that the companies them-
selves were incapable of policing what they had.
This article, though, isn’t here to discuss Mortal Kombat in detail. Instead, this article is intended to show the timeline for when fighting games first appeared on the scene in arcades. In the early days of the arcades, most games had to do with space aliens attacking, players driving tanks across wire-frame 3D landscapes, and even guiding a cute yellow critter around a maze eating dots and monsters.
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