<\/a>"I'm going to make my parents divorce and then get Liu Kang to adopt me...."<\/p><\/div>\n
I\u2019m sure parents wouldn\u2019t have said it at the time but there is something terribly romantic about this time in gaming. The thought of kids running to the arcade after school, lining up with their friends and classmates, acting like their favourite characters, talking about who was the better player and whatever else kids talk about, probably daring each other to do gross or embarrassing things, and all being together is sort of\u2026well\u2026sweet, even if they were there to digitally beat the shit out of each other. They were all there because if you wanted to play the hottest game, which was Mortal Kombat, you had to be there, because even though there were consoles, not everyone had them and Mortal Kombat was arcade-only at this point. Without getting too hyperbolic, it reminds me of the way people discuss how when Shakespeare was writing, theatre wasn\u2019t just for the rich, but was one of the only forms of entertainment for everyone and no one wanted to miss this writer. If you wanted cutting edge gaming in 92, you had to be at the arcade.<\/p>\n
I was 4 years old for most of 1992 so almost all of this article comes from second-hand experience. Gamers who were around at that time, the ones who I conjectured about in the last paragraph, don\u2019t remember the arcade world like 16th<\/sup> century England but like the Old West. They talk of practicing alone whenever they had the chance to perfect their craft, knowing their time alone with the game wouldn\u2019t be long. They fondly remember systemically trying every combination of buttons in order to determine special moves. There was always someone looking to take down the gamer on top. They talk about hiding their controls when the game yelled \u201cFINISH HIM\u201d, hitting a combination of buttons and joystick directions quickly and performing a Fatality, a gory finishing move in front of wide-eyed younger gamers who didn\u2019t know such things were possible, let alone how they were done. They reminisce about working so hard to be the best in their neighbourhood, and when that happened, roving from arcade to arcade, trying to find someone better than them, someone they can learn from. They still look a little scared when they talk about how they felt when they weren\u2019t getting any better and knew someone else out there was, that they were falling behind that person, that they might just be a big fish in a small pond, and all the people they\u2019ve beat and dazzled would lose respect for them if someone from another arcade came in and mopped the floor with them.<\/p>\nAll of this may sound odd to us now. Some of us might find it quaint, hiding combos in a pre-Internet age. For some it may seem contradictory; getting out of the house to play video games with other people? That\u2019s the antithesis of a lazy loner gamer. Some may find it outright depressing to consider how little gaming time you\u2019d actually get, having to wait in line behind all these other people. And while I agree that there is plenty of truth to these facets, I can\u2019t help but admit that it is also something utterly charming about it all, too.<\/p>\n
Of course, there is danger in that mentality. Like everything that has ever been romanticized, like Ye Olde England, the Old West, your first love or the cool indie theatre you went to before the huge chain came to town, things are always remembered more fondly than they deserve and they all came to an end for a reason. With that time in English history, maybe people got sick of being mostly illiterate, storing dead bodies in the water supply and child labour. Citizens of the Old West probably got sick of living in a lawless town, mostly filled with thieves and prostitutes, constantly struggling for mere survival, and instead wanted things like fresh food, comfort and dentistry not performed with mining tools. Maybe your first girlfriend made out with someone one summer up at her friend\u2019s cottage but says it was closed lips and they were drunk and it was during truth-or-dare and she\u2019s pretty sure he was gay anyway. Perhaps your local theatre should have cleaned up once in a while or paid for a security guard because more than half your attendance was sneaking in that side door. Whatever it is and whatever the cause, there\u2019s always a reason things change and with it comes positives and negatives.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Sleeping guard? Just like in the movie I just didn't pay for. META SECURITY!<\/p><\/div>\n
As I noted, the late 80s are generally viewed as the end of the golden era of the arcade, but as that closed, we grew closer to a golden of Mortal Kombat. The game was \u201cported over to\u201d (made available on) home consoles the next year. It was the here that Mortal Kombat would explode in popularity. For anyone who thinks there wasn\u2019t enough discussion of the actual game in this, I promise the continuation will contain way Mortal Kombat kontent. I just had to lay the foundation so I can talk about MK for the rest of the time. I will be discussing how large of a cultural phenomenon Mortal Kombat became, the backlash about the violence, the movies, the movie soundtrack(!!!!), the franchise\u2019s eventual fade from prominence and how modern culture and technologies are primed to bring it back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
James begins his look at Mortal Kombat. In this part: The Golden Age of Arcades and cyclical trends.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2238,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[399,401,400,398],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2228"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2228"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2276,"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2228\/revisions\/2276"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}