Mortal Kombat 2

I used to play this game with my cousin on an old computer with Windows 95, my uncle had downloaded the Snes9x emulator for me after my original Super Nintendo had a tragic encounter with milk. He did me the favor of also downloading a near complete set of ROMs so at a very young age I had access to nearly the entire SNES library. I did not play its masterpieces. Despite the wealth before me, a lot of the games I played were complete crap. Before my Super Nintendo met its end, the very first game I played was my copy of Killer Instinct that I played with my mother, so my taste for fighting games began early.

My uncle introduced me to the Mortal Kombat series with the very first game, with all of the blood taken out. Sub-Zero became my favorite character. I even tried to dress as him for Halloween. My other favorite was Raiden and after a trip to Chinatown I managed to find a hat that looked just like his. I never finished that Halloween costume. After seeing the game's various statues which ranged from its characters to sitting Buddhas, I asked my aunt for help with carving statues of my own. With a chisel in one hand and a round rock in my other, I tried my best to create that Buddha statue, but I didn't get much further than a couple of chips in a disappointed rock, who was screaming to be turned into a work of art. It was with the first Mortal Kombat that I fell in love with its characters, but only with the second did I fall in love with its world, since the first only offered one of orientalist fantasies.

The first stage that I remember seeing was the Dead Pool. Ever since I first laid my eyes on the Pit from the first game I've always had a strong fondness for Mortal Kombat's bridge levels, and this one was flanked by pools of green acid and surrounded by chains. I still remember its metal gridded windows, its red skies and its angry Asuras guarding the iron doors that would lead the inevitable victor to their escape after their opponent was turned into a green skeleton. My second favorite has always been the Wasteland, with its dark purple hue that permeates the atmosphere of the entire stage, with pauses in its colors from green patches of overgrown plants and the orange glow of the embers beneath a statue of a menacing bald sage. In the foreground were multiple corpses pierced into the ground by spears and further in the distance one could see a large Chinese castle with high walls adorned with lion statues and even higher spires, piercing its pixelated heavens.

There's five other notable stages that I'd like to take the time to mention. Another favorite, the Kombat Tomb, a stone hallway in an Outworld fortress, in the distance flies some kind of dark golden dragon through its burning skies, a detail I've always taken to show the player that we're far from any reality that resembles our own. If you perform a Stage Fatality you can knock your opponent into the spikes on the ceiling, where they'll get stuck, never to fall. The Armory was another stage that stimulated my young imagination, even today I find something very satisfying in watching the flows of its molten metals which constantly drip from a large structure my mind struggles to make sense of. It's all channeled into a long basin that stretches across both sides of the stage. Behind you there's racks covered in weapons, from axes to long swords and maces. On the wall the famous dragon logo is emblazoned. In one of the pillars a stone relief of a face is baring its sharp teeth. You can feel the room's oppressive heat.

In the Tower a purple clad monk with a hood can be seen with his hands clasped, floating in front of a large, insect shaped window that shows a rapidly moving sky that makes you wonder whether the clouds are moving that quickly, or somehow the building itself. Serpents, or maybe the tail of a dragon, spiral around its cylindrical columns. A long maroon carpet is laid from end to end of the hallway and golden scarabs line the wall in thick reliefs. Identical monks float in another stage, guarding a black maelstrom with an unknown destination. You can see a large, orange moon and many stone slabs that float in front of the portal, serving as an entrance, while lightning flashes in the center of its black hole. The sky itself warps into the shape of a vortex around the center of the rift, as if to highlight its otherworldly weight.

The very last that I remember is very simply titled the Pit II, it's another bridge level but this time in a mountainous region. Far in the background you can see a replica of the bridge you're fighting on, with two combatants in their battle stances, facing one another but neither making the first move. One of the fighters is engulfed in flames. The design of the bridge itself is more elaborate than in the first game, rather than a simple concrete bridge we're shown a bridge adorned with what look like little embellishments of monstrous teeth and dimly lit lanterns. I think the lack of spikes makes this Stage Fatality more disappointing, but when your opponent flies towards the rocky ground you can see the Super Nintendo switch to Mode 7 for a pseudo-3D effect until they splatter against the ground with a satisfying crunch.

This was the first Mortal Kombat on a Nintendo console to feature blood without having to use some kind of bizarre Action Replay code to change the color of the sprites for "sweat". Since I was never able to figure out the Fatalities, the only way I could ever see them was to lose enough times for the opponent to use theirs on me. It was with this game that I began to develop a taste for a kind of ultraviolence that can only be rendered through pixel art. Although I had been exposed to Kill Bill at a young age and already had a taste for seeing blood on screen, it felt entirely different to see such sanguinity depicted through the drawings of thick flows and large droplets that splatted across the screen with the heavy weight of liquid metal. There's a certain embarassment that comes with liking a game series that would later be known for its meat-headed depictions of women and its troubling relationship to characters of non-white ethnicities, but I'd like to think that the SNES Mortal Kombat games are before any of that grew into a real controversy. Much more controversial was its depiction of violence, which to this day I can't get enough of.

When my cousin and I finished playing we would go outside on the sidewalk to play Mortal Kombat in our own imaginations through make-believe battles and I'd pretend that it was the bridge of the Dead Pool and the grass flanking it were pools of bubbling acid. Something about the characters and stages of Mortal Kombat 2 unlocked pieces of my imagination that I'm still exploring and will continue to explore, hopefully through creations of my own, to make that rock I never sculpted just a little bit proud and to in some way raise it to the level of art.

1,254 words.

Special thanks to my family, for helping birth my eternal love of video games and the worlds they brought me to.