This Week in Retro: Mortal Kombat 3 (Patreon)

April 15, 1995: MK3 proves the Kombat Kraze is mortal

by Diamond Feit

It's hard to explain or even understand the speed at which Street Fighter II took over arcades in 1991 and then, within a year, how Mortal Kombat leapt into the foreground and seemed to be the coolest video game ever made. Oh, you thought those cartoon-people were tough? Well here's a game starring real people who gush blood after every hit, and when the match ends, one of them might DIE VIOLENTLY. Mortal Kombat served as a harbinger for the decade: The party-time 1980s were over. Get ready for the grimdark ’90s.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Mortal Kombat phenomenon was the viral nature of the game's secrets. The characters had the ability to perform special moves like any other fighting game did, even if the commands for those moves were unusual. Fatalities introduced an added layer of mystery—and forbidden mystery at that, considering that most video games at this time were decidedly aimed at kids and seldom featured graphic violence or gore of any kind. (Emphasis on "most"; I am aware Mortal Kombat was not the first "violent video game".) Watching two players fight it out and seeing the "Finish Him!" prompt appear was an incredibly tense moment: Do the victor know how to do that? Or will they just use an uppercut to end things? The most reliable way to see a Fatality in the early days was to watch a human fight the computer, wait for the player to lose to a late-stage computer-controlled opponent, and hope the A.I. would brutally murder them.

Yet somehow, in a pre-internet world, tidbits of info and rumors surrounding Mortal Kombat spread far and fast. There was always a kid who knew somebody who knew somebody who said he fought a secret character, or could play as Goro. When one kid in my local spot started doing Fatalities, we all wanted to know the secret (and find out where he learned his information). The following spring, I spent time as an exchange student in France, and when I hit the local arcades, I had to explain (in French, no less) how to make Sub-Zero decapitate his enemies.

The following year, as Mortal Kombat was coming to home consoles in a massive, coordinated media event dubbed "Mortal Monday," Mortal Kombat II was in arcades, and it exceeded the first game in every way. It had more characters, more Fatalities, more secrets, more rumors, more colors, and even more lore that went beyond the first game's bare-bones ripoff of Enter the Dragon. 

For all that Mortal Kombat II got right, though, one disappointing aspect was inevitable: Some of the shock value had worn off. The first time we all saw a video game character dismember another, we were aghast. Once that game had become a massive hit and spawned a sequel, the violence wasn't as surprising the second time around.

Two years later, mere months before a Mortal Kombat motion picture debuted in theaters, Midway released Mortal Kombat 3. With this second sequel, the novelty factor had long since evaporated. And where Mortal Kombat II had represented leaps and bounds over the simplistic first game, the third game felt stagnant despite making some fundamental changes to how the game worked.

If Mortal Kombat 3 failed to wow arcadegoers in the spring and summer of 1995, it wasn't because the development team had rested on their laurels. Just as MKII included more characters than the first game, MK3 offered more characters still, half of whom were brand new (and all of whom had been newly filmed for their in-game sprite footage). With the addition of a brand new "Run" button, characters could move faster in short bursts and perform combinations of attacks. This meant more offensive options for players beyond the uppercut, which had been the default move in the previous games to punish vulnerable opponents. In single-player mode, a new "choose your destiny" difficulty selection enabled players to decide how long their journey to the final battle with Shao Khan would be.

MK3 also introduced a "Kombat Kode" feature: Before every 2-player match, each player could enter one-half of a six-character code on the bottom of the screen. These codes added a variety of effects to the match, from disabling throws or blocking to handicapping one player over the other and even randomly switching characters for both players every few seconds. At the end of every single-player game, a 10-character "Ultimate Kombat Kode" could be entered to permanently unlock Smoke as a playable character. Naturally, these inputs began as secrets that slowly leaked out through various advertisements and commercials.

With all these new features and expansions added to Mortal Kombat 3, what went wrong? As anyone who has access to social media can tell you, change does not equal progress, and some of the changes made to Mortal Kombat were met with confusion or even derision. The character lineup was larger and featured a variety of new faces*, but that came at the expense of multiple established characters. Scorpion, Johnny Cage, Kitana, Mileena, Raiden, and Reptile were all cut, and Sub-Zero was radically redesigned. In place of the old "ninja" fighters were new "cyborg ninjas" who looked like motocross racers wearing big helmets with dreadlocks. Other questionable new characters were Nightwolf, a Native American played by a white man in makeup, and less-than-athletic police officer Kurtis Stryker.

*Many of the returning characters were played by new actors, a conspicuous change that did Mortal Kombat 3 no favors. Unbeknownst to the average fan at the time, the cast changes stemmed from disputes over royalties paid to the core cast of the first two games, which in hindsight makes MK3 a bitter product to swallow. This might have factored into the decision to stop using live actors as characters; after all, Ryu and Ken had no complaints about their images being used for billions of corporate profits.

The gameplay innovations had their share of detractors as well. The Run button combo system, while adding new tools for players, was limited: Unlike other fighting games at the time, the Run combos in MK3 involved very specific button sequences. They were all memorization, no improvisation. The Kombat Kodes were a fun way to mix things up, but they were hard to use as every code required two players to cooperate, and the window to enter them was very brief. Mortal Kombat Fatalities were already complicated commands; now imagine two players trying to enter them at the same time just to add a special effect to a match.

Speaking of Fatalities, with MK3 being the third game in four years it would seem the idea well had run dry. A good Fatality should be gruesome or hilarious, and very few in MK3 qualify as either; most are just weird. Take Jax for example: In MK2 he could crush his opponent's head with his bare hands, Story of Ricky-style, or he could tear his opponent's arms off. Both were simple, shocking finishers guaranteed to make at least one spectator in the arcade shout out loud. In MK3, with his new cybernetic arms, he can chop his opponent into 4 neat pieces or he can grow into a giant and step on them. Huh?

The new Animalities don't fare much better. Added to MK3 after years of rumors surrounding MK2, nearly all of them follow the same dull pattern: Character morphs into a brightly-colored low-res animal and mauls their screaming opponent. Beyond the transformation sequence, these feature very little animation, and there's hardly any gore to be seen. A nature special is more gruesome than most Animalities, and they let you watch those in school.

Finally, there was one problem with Mortal Kombat 3 that no one could have anticipated: The rise of the Internet. It may not be the Internet we know today, but in 1995 commercial websites were already available. Any tech enthusiast (and if we're looking at video game fans, we're talking about some significant Venn overlap) would likely have access to newsgroups or forums already. I certainly did, which meant all of Mortal Kombat 3's secrets were just one screeching modem-call away. The proliferation of free information combined with the growing familiarity of the Mortal Kombat core concept meant that MK3 had almost no mystery or dangerous qualities at all, preventing it from catching hold of the same audience that the first two games had.

Mortal Kombat 3 would be the final game in the series to feature real people as in-game character models. There would be a enhanced revision released later in 1995 called Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 with additional characters, and Mortal Kombat Trilogy on home consoles featured more characters still, but when Mortal Kombat 4 debuted in 1997 it was a 3D fighting game made with polygons, not photos of human beings (with one exception). 

MK3 might have disappointed fans in many regards. Certainly it was my last Mortal Kombat; I did not follow the series into the third dimension. Nevertheless, I still spent dozens of hours playing the base version and all its derivatives. The first two games had received compromised ports to 16-bit home consoles, but MK3/UMK3 would appear on PlayStation and Saturn with near-arcade quality graphics and CD-quality sound - I for one appreciated being able to play the character select theme and the subway theme on repeat. As a Shang Tsung fan, I had to learn every character to an extent which meant memorizing an astonishing number of commands, combos, Fatalities, Babalities, Friendships, and Animalities.

I'm sure the fact that I was a teenager living at home with no urgent commitments played a role in my dedication to Mortal Kombat 3; I had nothing but time to practice, and there were few thrills available to me greater than playing MK in an arcade and showing off to younger players and spectators alike. Mortal Kombat 3 wasn't the highest note to go out, on but I'll always remember it fondly as a flawed pop culture third chapter alongside Terminator 3 and Star Trek: Voyager: I'm glad they exist, even if they weren't as good as I would have hoped.