Finish Him Part One: It Begins (Mortal Kombat 1 Fatalities – All Versions)

This is the first in a series of blog posts where I review fighting game fatalities in a retrospective. The factors considered will be:

Blood and Guts: How visceral the fatality is

Originality: Points for creativity

Impact: For lack of a better term, how much oomph the fatality has

There are a lot of fatalities that are similar, so to prevent some repetition and boring descriptions, some of them will be summed up as tropes. These tropes will be tallied to show how widespread some of them are. Because Mortal Kombat is such a sprawling series, and is the reason why this article exists in the first place, it will get its own tallies. I don’t think that any of the other series will qualify for its own tropes list.

Tropes

DECAP ATTACK: Decapitations. Seriously, there are so many decapitations in these damn games. At least not all of them are delivered the same way.

IT’S ELECTRIC: Fatalities involving electricity.

PANTS ON FIRE: Fatalities involving fire.

ICE SORE: Fatalities involving ice.

HEADED FOR TROUBLE: General violence done to the dome, separate from decapitations.

IRRITABLE BOWELS: Some games do a surprising amount of violence to the guts, but this trope isn’t just for that. It’s also for fatalities involving, well, the butt. You’ll see. Shame will be had.

THEY (HAD) LEGS: Fatalities involving the legs.

FINE YOUNG CANNIBALS: Fatalities where one character eats the other, or eats a part of them. May not strictly be cannibalism depending on the characters’ species, but references help make writing stick.

KISS ME DEADLY: There are a surprising amount of fatalities involving kisses that are not the least bit romantic…

BOOBS OF DOOM: Not a popular trope, but one featured in a couple of games, wherein a sexy (your mileage may vary) female character finishes her opponent off by flashing them.

HEARTBREAKERS: Fatalities involving the heart/chest

SHATTERHAND (AND EVERYTHING ELSE): Fatalities involving a character getting broken into tiny little pieces

HATE TO SPLIT: When a character is split or cut in two

Finally, I will take the liberty of ranking all of these games based on the quality of their fatalities. With that out of the way, let’s start all the way back at the beginning, with…

Mortal Kombat (1992) (Arcade)

Thirty years old. Hard to believe, isn’t it? This damn game is older than some of the people playing Mortal Kombat 11.

I explained the reason for summing some fatalities up with the tropes list, but I feel the need to describe all of the fatals in this game because it’s the codifier for the concept. I will also compare and contrast the original arcade version’s fatals with some of the console ports.

Johnny Cage uppercuts his opponent’s head off. A bit basic, but the flair comes in with the blood droplets that fall after the head.

DECAP ATTACK: One

Kano rips his foe’s heart out. It’s still beating as the round ends. To me, this is just as memorable as Sub-Zero’s fatal in this game. This fatal is viscerally creepy in its bluntness, and it’s no surprise that Midway got in a lot of trouble with MK. This is the basic concept of many of Kano’s fatals, and was recreated in the Mortal Kombat movie reboot.

HEARTBREAKER: One

Raiden electrocutes his foe’s head until it explodes. Simple, but classic.

HEADED FOR TROUBLE: One

IT’S ELECTRIC: One

Liu Kang’s fatal is… not great, especially for our protagonist. He merely does a kick and an uppercut. One fatal that didn’t require censorship in console and handheld ports. This was before Liu got any of his really cool powers that they could work into his fatals.

Scorpion reveals that under his mask is a skull face, and he can breathe fire to immolate his foe. Surprisingly unchanged in the Super NES port, but the Genesis version has more fire.

PANTS ON FIRE: One

Sub-Zero removes the spine from his foe. Simple, but classic. In hindsight, it’s kind of interesting that his fatal doesn’t use any of his ice powers, but like Kano’s heart rip, Sub-Zero’s spine rip is so iconic, that it’s the base for many of his later fatalities.

HEADED FOR TROUBLE: Two

Sonya blows a kiss that immolates her foe. Rather quirky. Surprisingly, her fatal is the same across all versions.

KISS ME DEADLY: One

PANTS ON FIRE: Two

Mortal Kombat (Super NES)

Notoriously censored compared to the arcade and Sega Genesis/Sega CD ports – but that meant that the publisher had to get… creative with how the fatals were represented.

Johnny appears to lodge his foot into his foe’s chest, which feels like it could be an actual MK fatal in later games, but there’s no blood or gore here.

Kano just sort of… holds his fist up against his foe’s chest as sweat flies off.

Raiden uses his electricity to turn his foe into ash, except for their head.

IT’S ELECTRIC: Two

Sub-Zero jumps back, freezes his foe, and then shatters them down to his feet. Honestly not bad, and it does integrate his ice powers!

ICE SORE: One

SHATTERHAND (AND EVERYTHING ELSE): One

I have to give the SNES port some credit for having to work around Nintendo’s censorship, but yes, they’re not as good as the arcade original’s fatals. Replacing the blood with sweat is just… silly, and not in the intentional way that MK usually is.

…Huh. Anyone else feeling a sense of… foreshadowing?

Mortal Kombat (Game Boy and Game Gear)

There isn’t much that interests me about the GB port, but it did something unique and kind of creative with Raiden’s fatal. He turns into electricity to defeat his foe. In the GG version, he gets his original arcade fatal, as well as a censored one where he merely knocks the foe out with a thunder blast. The thunder god gets a different fatal in four different versions.

IT’S ELECTRIC: Four

Meanwhile, Sub-Zero just gets to uppercut his foe in the censored GG fatal.

Power Rankings

1. MK (1992)

2. MK (GG)

3. MK (SNES)

4. MK (GB)