Moral panic Mortal Kombat sparked widespread controversy on its release. Moral panic Mortal Kombat sparked widespread controversy on its release. On its release in 1993, Midway's gore-filled fighting game ushered in a new era of hyperviolent gaming that continues to influence the industry to this day O n 9 December 1993, Democratic senator Joe Lieberman sat before a congressional hearing on video game violence and told attendees that the video game industry had crossed a line. The focus of his ire was Mortal Kombat, Midway's bloody fighting game, recently released on the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo Entertainment System after a successful run in the arcades. "Blood splatters from the contestants' heads," he told the room. "The game narrator instructs the player to finish his opponent.

The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter. Next month, Mortal Kombat turns 30. Look back on that 1992 arcade game now and it almost seems quaint. But what many gamers may not remember--or were simply not yet alive to experience--was that Mortal Kombat was the eye in a violence-in-video-games storm. Its spine-ripping gore was the stuff of congressional hearings and contributed to the creation of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, which to this day puts content and age ratings on games.

The humble video game movie tends to get it from all sides. Critics turn up their noses and gaming nerds are often equally hard to please, albeit on very different points of principle. Kids are perhaps the most forgiving demographic for the video game film, which is why the belated Sonic the Hedgehog film franchise has done well to squarely target them. It gets the job done, perhaps a little too thoroughly at more than two hours in length. Many of the best video game adaptations succeed by making it all a bit of a joke.

Arcades occupy a unique place in video game history. In the late 1970s and 1980s, a string of hits like Space Invaders, Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong ushered in new gameplay mechanics and bright, crispy pixel graphics. The 1990s featured the fighting game boom with Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, and Virtua Fighter demonstrating cutting-edge graphics and gameplay. It was the place to be, a time when the cutting edge in video games, from texture-mapped polygonal graphics to peripheral control inputs (including steering wheels, light guns, and dance-mats), could only be found crammed into immaculately designed cabinets, complete with their showy bezels and marquees. Arcades dodged hardware limitations largely due to their ability to optimize the hardware specifically to play one single game.

From “penny dreadfuls” to comic books to music, often the best way to make a business boom has been to try limiting it.

Configuring one's expectations before settling down to watch the latest big (and small) screen adaptation of Mortal Kombat is something of a process. The largely wretched game-to-movie subgenre carries with it little-to-no hope at this stage, even the so-called "best" examples are seen as just about tolerable, and the last two attempts to translate Midway's long-running fighting game failed to justify why watching these characters battle it out would be preferable to playing as them instead. As popular as the game still is (the most recent iteration has sold over 8m copies worldwide), transporting it to film is still a rather dated prospect, almost 25 years after the last version, the result of a torturous period in development hell. So while the odds might seem stacked against it, the film also arrives at an opportune time, as cinemas are opening up again and audiences are craving bigger, gaudier events to lure them back. Just weeks after their record Godzilla vs Kong success (a hit proving that after a year of misery, appealing to our basest, silliest instincts is a surefire win right now), Warners is using the same hybrid release for Mortal Kombat, chucking it up on HBO Max and out in cinemas at the same time.

In the games and the original movies, Kano has always been portrayed as a thieving, conniving villain, and little else (besides a mortal rival for Kombatant Sonya Blade). In this film, he is the engine that keeps the story moving, as he steals every scene he's in and gets the biggest laughs. And like Cole, he is the audience's other surrogate in understanding "Mortal Kombat's" bizarre, violent, supernatural world, and the beings that live in it, including the thunder god Raiden.

It was not an auspicious beginning. The first video game featuring hand-to-hand combat hit arcades in 1976: Sega's boxing sim Heavyweight Champ, starred two chunky monochrome pugilists in striped underpants. Players controlled the action by putting their hands in plastic boxing gloves and making thrusting movements. Heavyweight Champ bombed, and so did its rivals. Atari's 1977 arcade game Boxer would have used two analogue handles as controllers, but it was never released because in-house testers of the prototype cabinet kept wrenching off the handles.

What makes a good video game movie? Is there even such a thing? The curse of the video game movie has long been documented, and the stigma that it's impossible to make a good one regardless of how much money you throw at it or who plays the lead has dogged the genre for years. Video games are more lucrative than Hollywood films overall, yet video game adaptations still struggle to be taken seriously by studio executives, who often misunderstand what makes the source material so popular to begin with. The anatomy of what makes a game-to-film adaptation tick is particularly relevant now with the release of Detective Pikachu, an adaptation of one of the franchise's lesser-known properties, a spinoff crime-solving game by the same name.

A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. The Strong National Museum of Play announced the 2019 inductees to the World Video Game Hall of Fame on Thursday and added four new games to its roster. Established in 2015, the World Video Game Hall of Fame honors all kinds of electric games – computer, handheld, console, arcade and mobile – and has recognized 24 games since its founding. Criteria for inductees examines four categories: the game's icon status (is it widely recognized?), longevity (is it more than a passing fad?), geographical reach (are people playing it all over the world?) and influence (has the game affected the industry as a whole, popular culture or society in general?). And the 2019 inductees are... (drumroll, please!) "Microsoft Solitaire" debuted in 1990 on the Windows 3.0 computing platform and became ubiquitous around the world, according to a news release from The Strong Museum.