Roger Sharpe has two children, an executive office, and a 40 percent accuracy rate with an Uzi. Today he’s even shouldering the artillery to prove it, his long mustache bristling with excitement as he walks into his company’s game room. Five minutes later the video screen he’s been firing at flashes “game over,” and a scantily clad screen seductress blows Sharpe a kiss. The licensing manager for Midway Manufacturing looks at his 41,000 bonus score and smiles. Another day, another successful game of Revolution X.
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But the histories were not the programmers’ only innovation. Tobias had several martial arts friends who agreed to dress up in costumes and act out choreographed fights on videotape. The images were then digitally transferred from video to computer so they could be manipulated, and character voices were recorded, also digitally. Tobias says he and Boon and three or four assistants would get together in the sound studio and grunt, trying to get just the right pitch for character reactions. The original game was ready for test play in five months.
The game takes place at a martial arts tournament staged by Shang Tsung, minion of the evil outerworld. Players choose to play one of nine characters who fight each other to rise through the tournament and eventually face Shang Tsung in a final battle. Players can also fight each other, on two consoles containing a joystick and five buttons each.
At Times Square, a video arcade on Broadway that’s one of Midway’s many testing grounds for new games, 17-year-old Gary is giving the company plenty of positive reinforcement. “I can rip people’s intestines out and all that,” he says, detailing his prowess on the Mortal Kombat II machine. Behind him, a crowd of teenagers watch. Specifically, they’re watching Gary’s hands.
The best part, say many players, are the fatalities. Each character’s power level–in other words, the amount of life he has left in him–is represented by a red bar at the top of the screen. As characters sustain punches, kicks, lightning bolts, and fire, you can see the level drop. Drive your opponent to zero and the game yells, in a gravelly voice, “Finish him!” With the right sequence of joystick taps and button hits, you can kill your opponent in a number of gruesome ways. Raiden vaporizes his opponents. Jax, a burly marine, pulls their arms off. Reptile rips off his mask, whips out a long tongue, and eats their heads. “Reptile wins!” MKII might scream. Then: “Fatality.” Slowly, the red print of the word “fatality” turns into drops of blood that ooze slowly to the bottom of the screen.
Eugene Provenzo, a media professor from the University of Miami who testified at the subcommittee’s first hearing, compared video games to the Feelies, the futuristic media in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. “Video games are evolving into a new type of interactive media–participatory television.”
