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Mortal Kombat II
Version 1Mortal Kombat II is a fighting game developed by Midway and published by Acclaim Entertainment, originally released for arcades in 1993 and ported to Genesis, DOS, Amiga, and other platforms in 1994. It is the sequel to Mortal Kombat, a game that had already caused enough trouble to get hauled in front of the United States Senate.
To understand why MK II mattered so much, you have to remember what Mortal Kombat had already done. The first game arrived in arcades in 1992 and became the biggest arcade hit of the year. When the home ports shipped on September 13, 1993 — "Mortal Monday," as the marketing people called it — the Genesis version outsold the SNES version two to one, largely because Sega kept the blood and Nintendo replaced it with sweat. Within two months, 2 million Genesis cartridges had been sold. That was before Senator Joe Lieberman got involved and the whole thing ended up in a Senate hearing about violence in videogames, which led directly to the creation of the ESRB rating system. All from one fighting game.
To understand why MK II mattered so much, you have to remember what Mortal Kombat had already done. The first game arrived in arcades in 1992 and became the biggest arcade hit of the year. When the home ports shipped on September 13, 1993 — "Mortal Monday," as the marketing people called it — the Genesis version outsold the SNES version two to one, largely because Sega kept the blood and Nintendo replaced it with sweat. Within two months, 2 million Genesis cartridges had been sold. That was before Senator Joe Lieberman got involved and the whole thing ended up in a Senate hearing about violence in videogames, which led directly to the creation of the ESRB rating system. All from one fighting game.
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