Tag: Mortal Kombat

Get over here… and learn more about the release of the next book from David L. Craddock.

The author of Monsters in the Dark: The Making of X-COM: UFO Defense, Shovel Knight, and many more will dive into another mostly unexplored corner of video game history this October with Long Live Mortal Kombat Round 1: The Fatalities and Fandom of the Arcade Era.

As you might have guessed from the title, Long Live Mortal Kombat Round 1 will focus on the early days of the franchise (specifically Mortal Kombat through Mortal Kombat 4), and will be the first volume in a trilogy of books:

Long Live MK Round 1 is divided into four sections, organized according to material that concerns MK1, MKII, MK3 and Ultimate MK3, and MK4. You’ll discover the obstacles co-creators Ed Boon and John Tobias faced as they made each game, the ways Midway’s culture influenced MK’s creative and technical directions, how Acclaim revolutionized video game advertising by going all-in on the multi-million-dollar “Mortal Monday” campaign, learn how actors from the games and films landed their roles, and other crucial events in MK history.

If you’d like to get an early look at Long Live Mortal Kombat Round 1, the author was generous enough to share excerpts from the book with a quartet of outlets:

Game Informer – Read An Exclusive Excerpt From Long Live Mortal Kombat: Round 1, A Novel On The Early History Of MK

Nintendo Life – How Mortal Kombat Led To The Birth Of E3 And The ESRB

PC Gamer – Why do Mortal Kombat 3 players still insist on keyboard controls 27 years later?

Shacknews – How Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3’s Tier List Determined the Best Fighters

Craddock is currently seeking funding through Kickstarter to publish Long Live Mortal Kombat Round 1. If the campaign is successful, the book will be available in a Standard Edition (in your choice of hardcover, paperback, or ebook) and an oversized Ultimate Edition with dozens of photographs and a stylized layout.

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UPDATE (4/12/22): It’s your lucky day as the author has returned with three additional excerpts for Long Live Mortal Kombat Round 1, bringing the total to seven:

Ars Technica – The punch that changed Mortal Kombat history

Game Developer – Crushed: Inside Capcom’s Marketing Feud with Acclaim and Mortal Kombat

Medium – How Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat Divided Arcades

And congratulations are also in order, as Craddock’s project is now fully-funded on Kickstarter.

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UPDATE (10/4/22): It’s release week for Long Live Mortal Kombat Round 1 and author David Craddock is back with one more excerpt. This time, he shared a story with IGN (Mortal Kombat Nitro Developer Remembers the Faster, Bloodier SNES Version That Never Was) about Sculptured Software’s plan to release a bloodier upgrade of Mortal Kombat for the Super NES.

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UPDATE (10/8/22): Happy 30th Anniversary to Mortal Kombat! To celebrate, David Craddock shared yet another excerpt with Ars Technica. This time he delves into the story behind the fight over the actor who claims he co-created Mortal Kombat.

The Mortal Kombat franchise has been spilling blood and ripping spines for 30 years, and we’re bound to see some sort of celebratory announcement from NetherRealm Studios later this year.

But first, fans will be able to revisit the history of the series in David Church’s Mortal Kombat: Games of Death. In addition to recalling its arcade debut (and the political backlash it caused after moving to the Genesis and Super NES), Church will explore the multicultural inspirations behind the franchise’s creation, and its evolution over the years:

Upon its premiere in 1992, Midway’s Mortal Kombat spawned an enormously influential series of fighting games, notorious for their violent “fatality” moves performed by photorealistic characters. Targeted by lawmakers and moral reformers, the series directly inspired the creation of an industrywide rating system for video games and became a referendum on the wide popularity of 16-bit home consoles. Along the way, it became one of the world’s most iconic fighting games, and formed a transmedia franchise that continues to this day.

This book traces Mortal Kombat’s history as an American product inspired by both Japanese video games and Chinese martial-arts cinema, its successes and struggles in adapting to new market trends, and the ongoing influence of its secret-strewn narrative world. After outlining the specific elements of gameplay that differentiated Mortal Kombat from its competitors in the coin-op market, David Church examines the various martial-arts films that inspired its Orientalist imagery, helping explain its stereotypical uses of race and gender. He also posits the games as a cultural landmark from a moment when public policy attempted to intervene in both the remediation of cinematic aesthetics within interactive digital games and in the transition of public gaming spaces into the domestic sphere. Finally, the book explores how the franchise attempted to conquer other forms of media in the 1990s, lost ground to a new generation of 3D games in the 2000s, and has successfully rebooted itself in the 2010s to reclaim its legacy.

Mortal Kombat: Games of Death was recently published in hardcover and paperback by University of Michigan Press as part of their Landmark Video Games series. It’s also available to download as an open access title via Fulcrum in multiple formats.