May 082019
It’s Kombat Time! Let’s look back on the first four games in this klassic fighting game franchise, from the gruesome arcade original to the polygonal MK4.
SHOW NOTES
0:00:00 – In The Beginning (MK1)
0:22:44 – Hall (MK1)
0:24:23 – Courtyard (MK1)
0:27:10 – Warrior’s Shrine (MK1)
0:30:19 – The Pit (MK1)
0:46:00 – Prologue: The Battlefield (MKII)
0:47:29 – The Screaming Forest (MKII)
0:49:28 – The Armory (MKII)
0:51:16 – WDYLMA (MKII)
1:09:06 – The Roof (UMK3)
1:10:53 – The Subway (UMK3)
1:12:49 – The Bridge (UMK3)
1:14:50 – The Pit (UMK3)
1:26:52 – The Woods (MK Gold)
1:29:14 – Prison (MK Gold)
1:31:49 – The Screw (MK Gold)
1:40:54 – Ending (MKII)
Yoooooooooo! This Is what’s up! Made my day and shit. Glad to see reverence for the Genesis version of 1 and 2…. Master works they are indeed and I prefer them over the arcade! Keep it up 💯🤟🏿🕷
I very much associate the sound of Genesis Mortal Kombat with those initial times that you stay up all night as a child, around that 4:30 AM mark, when your body is at its coldest and it feels like the sun will never come back, as time slows to the point that you’re convinced an entire one’s life could be lived out for the duration of the just slightly unnerving void of loud quietness in-between the music.
You can spell out C R A Z Y C Y R A X on a six button controller and I think that’s pretty neat.
Love it. LOVE IT. The only thing I could ask for was more of that multi-system track comparison. Matt Furniss ROCKED the Genesis versions of 1-3, and more credit needs to be given to Shaun Hollingworth, the genius who wrote the drivers Matt Furniss used to make his magic. No one got drums to sound like those two did on the Genesis. BTW, Furniss would be a great subject for a composer focus……and he’s been doing interviews in the last few years. Consider this freaking beast of a track: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=noNpP76CQoM&list=PL-vD6rIjXrcJKGCir5MgMYd2ghQ0Otlh7&index=7&t=0s
Lastly, am I the only one who couldn’t stop thinking this might be the year Elston breaks down and does Street Fighter Rocktober?
Oops, Furniss wasn’t on MK3. My bad.
……And I hope, Brett, that you’ve heard this Furniss Classic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qaalInUpjxU&list=PL-vD6rIjXrcImi_GHfT0VW3gtrEWEXAgQ&index=4&t=0s
I came to a realization during the cast that how perfect the timing for mortal Kombat was. I was right at that age when I was supposed to be growing out of gaming so I was looking for more adult games to maintain my continued time with it as my hobby. MK fit that perfectly. Adult humor, intense gore, photorealistic characters, plus all that controversy giving it a allure.
I remember first seeing the Cabinet at an Ames department store entrance. Where they always had 2-4 machines to suck quarters while my parents shopped. I remember it vividly because it had replaced the aging NES Play choice cabinet . Me and my brother were playing against each other and my mom came out and saw all the blood squirting out of each other as we punched each other. She was mortified and dragged us out immediately before we could even finish the match.
The Cabinet disappeared a week or 2 later. Thus the obsession started. (fun note: figured out where it went and it was the local college’s on campus pub/restaurant.)
The peak for me was Mortal Kombat 2. It 100% destroyed my care for the original. It appeared in the local pizzeria and the rest is local legend. The whole town’s child population became obsessed with it. The moment school got out the pizzeria was packed with greasy teenagers. There could be roughly 10 kids at any one time from the time school was out to dusk. That place made a killing on their slices.
It was everywhere. Kids were fawning over any gaming magazine with even a lick of info. The fatalities and moves were things of legend. This correlated with when me and a group of friends discovered something amazing. The local college library had a T1 connection. And tons of computers… with this thing called, “the internet”.
One of the very first things I ever remember looking up was the MK2 move list. And we found it. A 70 some odd page txt file we quickly squirreled away on numerous 3.5 floppies. We all found our own ways to print it out. They charged at the college to print.
Me, it was an elaborate fiasco. Our family was friends with the owner of the larger realty company in town. I knew the owners son. I told him about the file and disk I had. After hours we snuck into the office, popped on a machine and proceeded to print out 2 copies of this monster text file. We probably spent an hour waiting for it to print, on high nerves that someone could show up at any time. Once printed me both meticulously 3 ring binder holed the sheets and put it in our own binders. The whole thing took 2 hours at least.
So many strange and uniquely 90’s things is MK2 is. It was such a monsterous part of my childhood.
Funny part is I was never good at the game. I was just obsessed with knowing anythign I could. I could only actually do any of those moves maybe once out of every 10 tries.
I think there was another reason I was obsessed… Them female ninjas. That was my childhood sexual awakening. The kids in school with artistic abilities were selling drawn nudes of them for a killing for a time.
Anyhow, now that I got all that out. Great to hear the cast come back. Missed ya.
Was it done through Prodigy? Me and my friend found all the moves list and fatalities off there.
man, those UMK3 selections sound HEAVILY reminiscent of the original Killer Instinct soundtrack (which is, IMO, far superior). particularly in the climax sections that wrap up each track. while listening, I just kept thinking, “Eyedol, Eyedol, Eyedol…”
I played a fair share of the original MK trilogy, but I wouldn’t be able to hum a tune from any of them, even after listening to this episode. sound wise, I associate these games more with great voice recordings and SFX that really punctuated the hits than with music. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯