Mortal Kombat

Electronic Gaming Monthly awarded Mortal Kombat the title of "Most Controversial Game of 1993".[29] In 1995, the Daily News wrote, "the original Mortal Kombat video game debuted in 1992. Its combination of story line, character and mega-violence soon made it a hit worldwide. And the controversy engendered by its blood-gushing special effects only served to boost its popularity."[30] In 2007, CraveOnline ranked it second of the top ten 2D fighters of all time.[31]In 2008, Forbes called Mortal Kombat one of the "most loved arcade games" that was "king of the arcade" in its day, writing that the arcade machines of the original title go from a few hundred dollars to $2,500.[32] In 2011, Complex ranked the first Mortal Kombat as the 12th best fighting game of all time,[33] while Wirtualna Polska ranked it as the 19th best Amiga game.[34] In 2012, Time named it one of the 100 greatest video games of all time.[35] In 2013, the first Mortal Kombat was ranked as the best arcade game of the 1990s by Complex (the sequel, which "took everything we loved about the original and magnified it by about a million," landed at sixth place on the list).

The SNES port of Mortal Kombat was widely criticised by gaming media for censorship issues. In 2006, IGN named it as the eighth worst arcade-to-console conversion. Nintendo's decision to make the game more family friendly was also included on GameSpy's list of the dumbest moments in gaming.

Mortal Kombat (commonly abbreviated "MK") is a series of fighting games created by Ed Boon and John Tobias. The first four renditions and their updates were developed by Midway Games and initially released on arcade machines, and later to home consoles. The arcade titles were later picked up by Acclaim Entertainment for the home console conversions. Beginning with Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, Midway Games exclusively created home versions of Mortal Kombat up until Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe. Following Midway's bankruptcy, the franchise was picked up by Warner Bros. in July 2009 and became a part of the Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.

The development of the first game was originally based on idea of making a video game starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, but that idea fell through and Mortal Kombat was created instead and released in 1992. The original game has spawned many sequels and has been spun off into several action-adventure games, films (animated and live-action with its own sequel), and television series (animated andlive-action). Other spin-offs include various comic book series, a card game and a live-action tour. Along with Capcom's Street Fighter,Mortal Kombat has become one of the most successful and influential fighting franchises in the history of video games.

The series is known for its high levels of bloody violence, including, most notably, its Fatalities—finishing moves, requiring a sequence of buttons to perform, which, in part, led to the creation of the ESRB.^[2][3] The series name itself is also known for using the letter "K" in place of "C" for the hard C sound, thus intentionally misspelling the word "combat", as well as other words with the hard C sound within later games in the series. Early games in the series were especially noted for its realistic digitized sprites (which differentiated it from its contemporaries' hand-drawn sprites), as well as an extensive use of palette swapping to create new characters.