Mortal Kombat is 28 years old!!! That cannot be true because if it is, it means I am old as hell! Join me as I look back at this monumental arcade game.

Mortal Kombat is one of my all time favourite series of games. The first time I played Mortal Kombat was the arcade machine, but not like you would probably think, in an actual arcade. Instead, my first experience of Mortal Kombat was in a fish and chip shop during lunch break when I was in my first year of high school! A fish and chip shop is a common thing here in the UK and where I went to high school there were loads of them.

The game was brand spanking new at the time and this fish and chip shop always had an arcade machine in it, but people were amazed they managed to get Mortal Kombat. It took me a few days to be able to play it as, no exaggeration here. The line to play this game would be out there door and right up the side of the fish and chip shop, it was crazy. Getting sick of not being able to play it, a couple of days into Mortal Kombat taking over my school. I and a couple of buddies hatched a plan. It was like a military operation, but we came up with the fastest possible route to this fish and chip shop which should easily put up first in the line or if not, pretty damn close. It worked and we were finally able to play it, of course, I got my ass handed to me the first time I played it, but I was just blown away by how awesome the game was. Also, this fish and chip shop had the sound turned up to the max!

Right from here, Mortal Kombat had a real mystique to me. The digitized graphics, the fact one of the dudes looked like Van Damme and of course the blood! Mortal Kombat was huge and I vividly remember the Mortal Monday campaign for when the game was coming to home systems. This was one of those games that everyone I knew had. No matter if it was on the Amiga, Mega Drive, Game Boy, Master System or like me, SNES. Every kid who was into video games had a copy of Mortal Kombat.

The SNES version may not have been the best, but I still played the hell out of that game and I actually really liked the whole lore of the Mortal Kombat universe. Which at the time was very basic which is kind of hard to imagine with how in depth and deep it would become in the following decades.

I still have a soft spot for that first Mortal Kombat. Sure it may not have aged all that gracefully, but when you consider how short a timeframe this game was made in and the relatively small team behind it. It is quite amazing what they managed to accomplish. It also paved the way for one of the greatest video game series of all time.

One thing I find amusing about the first Mortal Kombat now is how tame it is. At the time this was as violent as it got and the game was one of the major reasons video games would go on to have age ratings on them. But if you look at a fatality in Mortal Kombat X and then compare it to the original Mortal Kombat it is almost comical.