Mortal Kombat 1’s exuberant ultra-violence shouldn’t need defending, but here we are

We’re doing this again, right?

I get it, the discourse of video games is one giant uroboros, an endless series of endlessly repeating events that come back like clockwork. Difficulty settings, review scores, the perennial ‘are games artistic’ debate will rear their heads again at some point in the future, but for now, back to the topic of video game violence. A true classic in the field of video game discourse, which has been talked about for decades. Hell, you can even call him the ‘godfather of video game speech’.

In fact, it’s very fitting that the discussion has once again been rebooted by nothing less than what appears to be a Mortal Kombat reboot. The Mortal Kombat 1 trailer dropped last week, and to no one’s surprise, it’s incredibly violent. Characters get their throats slit, their eyes pried open and, in a spectacular sequence at the end of the trailer, are kicked in the middle by an elder god while being held up by two elemental dragons. Sounds ridiculous, right? Well, it seems to have hit a particular nerve once again.

The visual fidelity of video games is exponentially more impressive these days, but it’s hard for me to see it as “realistic”. Severe? Absolutely. Disgusting? Your mileage may vary but sure, I can see what you mean. But ‘realistic’? It’s certainly meant to be pretty gruesome and I suppose if I were to kick a man in the middle it might look exactly like that, but surely context matters here. I’ve seen the Mortal Kombat 1 trailer described as ‘like a snuff movie‘ or as something you’d ‘see in leak live‘. Two completely absurd statements that left me wondering: did we see the same trailer?

I’m pretty sure I saw a couple of heads explode like garbage bags filled with waste, extremely violent, to be sure, but completely over-the-top to the point of intended humor. Something like The Last Of Us 2, for my money, is considerably more violent and shocking than any recent Mortal Kombat: Johnny Cage doesn’t yell the name of his friend you just disemboweled with a makeshift scion, for example, and he’s far away. more forceful, realistic and brutal.

Sure, some people made a bit of a fuss over the violence the moment we first saw footage of the game, but now it’s so mainstream that it even has its own HBO series. And yet, because it’s considered some kind of high art, not some silly fighting action game, there are no protests or people saying it would be better to remove it. ‘No Russian’ in the original Modern Warfare 2 was a highly controversial sequence, with much more ‘realistic’ violence than anything seen in the Mortal Kombat 1 trailer. For what it’s worth, I don’t want people complaining about the violence. in neither: I think both are extremely effective uses of violence, but what you see in Mortal Kombat is not the same.

It is at this point that we need to look at the relationship with the old ultraviolence in other media. A fairly common thing to see in horror movies over the years is that they constantly up the ante, pushing the gore-filled envelope further and further and eventually reaching what I’m going to begin to describe here as the ‘evil standoff’. ‘. It reaches a point with extreme violence where it crosses the Evil Dead point and becomes intentionally ridiculous. That doesn’t make it any less disgusting, horrible, or of course violent, but tonally, it’s completely different.

Martyrs and The Human Centipede are both horror movies and both feature a ‘realistic’ medical procedure center stage that takes place to create that uncomfortable sense of horror in the audience, but no one can tell me they come from the same place. – one is genuinely disturbing, the other is clearly played out to be ridiculously sick. Take the Saw movies too, for example. Once it became clear that people were totally in for the cruel deaths at the hands of Jigsaw’s increasingly intricate trappings, the series doubled down on how horrifying they could make them. I can’t imagine anyone going to the theater to see Saw IV thinking “Gee, I hope everyone gets out of this unscathed!” or they watched a Friday the 13th movie under the impression that they weren’t going to see Jason Voorhees stab a group of people with a huge knife.

Without sounding too psychopathic, there’s supposed to be a grim appeal to the violence on display. It’s not the same as watching that guy walk down the Normandy beach clutching his fucking arm in Saving Private Ryan.

Now, crucially, Mortal Kombat isn’t just about gore. It’s a consistently fantastic fighting game series from a mechanical point of view with genuinely iconic characters and a rich tapestry of lore and backstory to sink your teeth into, as well as being a series that often serves the single player game a lot. more than others within the genre. . However, it is completely synonymous with violence. Since day one, back in ’92, people have been saying that the realistic violence in Mortal Kombat has been corrupting society. Sure, the big red blobs flying off your character after a particularly meaty hook and Sub Zero ripping off his opponent’s head, with the entire spine intact, look a bit quaint now. But back then, this was the most horrific, disgusting, realistic depiction of gore ever seen. Someone, someonethink about children?

Now NeverRealm hasn’t done itself any favors here, with reports around the launch of Mortal Kombat 11 that it had its smashing artists looking at photos of actual car crash victims or some pretty deplorable bullshit, but the horrible practices at the workplace are not the target of this. article – obviously something bad and very stupid that happened. It’s also completely fine to think that Mortal Kombat is too violent! There’s a discussion to be had there, even if it’s not something I agree with.

I just think it’s pretty bad faith to say this is anything other than intentionally goofy gore that’s been the selling point of entire genres in all sorts of different media for years and years. It’s also not accurate to say that the older games were more “comic” as the original Mortal Kombat was meant to be as violent as technology allowed at the time and even recent games have the sillier side of the series, like “Friendship”. , is still a very important part of them.

Maybe I’m desensitized, maybe I’m part of a deep-seated problem with completely normalized video game violence, but some of the takes I’ve seen on gore in MK1 in the last few days have honestly made me feel like I’ve lived too long and I’ve seen too many speech cycles.