I am very bad at the Mortal Kombat games I like

I woke up at 6 this morning, my son was still asleep, the Nintendo Switch was an arm's length away and Mortal Kombat Legacy Collection was loaded up. I am terrible at Mortal Kombat.

The Legacy Collection is one of those "everything" video game omnibuses including even the most unwanted corners of a series' history. They've started to hit more and more, both because game preservation is important and because nostalgia will lead a person to try to recreate the experience of playing the Game Gear edition of a Bubsy sequel. As such, the Legacy Collection contains the first four Mortal Kombat games in almost every possible configuration, plus the deeply hated Mortal Kombat Mythologies games. I know there are people who would want to play Mortal Kombat in its Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis formats, but the tweaks between the two are so small to me they're practically invisible. I barely know how to pull off special moves as is, so I'm never going to clock differences in frame count or hit boxes.

I think I'd have to, though, to be any good at these games. The 2009 reboot is the earliest Mortal Kombat game I'm even passable at, which means the edges had been progressively sanded off for a decade before I was able to beat an MK game. Loading up the arcade version of Mortal Kombat 2 here, I was destroyed by the first character in the tournament (Jax) in seconds. I played as two different characters and got a combined four or five hits in before giving up. The game is fast and it is unforgiving. In a Street Fighter 2 game, the computer player will wait a moment after the match starts, ensuring you can at least get the first hit in. In Mortal Kombat 2, the matches began and Jax was immediately in my face, pummeling me to the ground.

It wasn't fun, and not because my ego was bruised. I truly do not care how good I am at Mortal Kombat 2. It wasn't fun because I wasn't really playing a video game, I was just unsure what to do, without enough time to input a special move command to teleport away from the beat down. My twitch reflex was not to play the game faster or better, it was to skitter my fingers across my controller's buttons and hope I could cheesily buy myself some breathing room. And I couldn't.

I then played the Mortal Kombat Mythologies games. The first stars Subzero and is broken. The second stars Jax and is broken.

I don't really mind this. The Legacy Collection includes enough documentary material that I'll get what I wanted out of the package. These games were created under weird circumstances, with small teams that have mostly stuck together over the past thirty years, and I'm happy to treat the Legacy Collection's bonus features as the main event.

I haven't dug into those features yet, so I don't know how much of this is addressed, but the primary weird circumstance I'm talking about is palette swapping. The characters in the first three games were "digitized," which is a stupid 90s way of saying they were based on real actors who were photographed doing all of the moves. It's stop motion, essentially. Arcade boards in 1992 (and, to a greater extent, Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis cartridges) had such a small amount of memory that the creators of Mortal Kombat had to be precious with what they put into their games. Even if they had the budget to film a dozen actors doing karate moves in a Chicago warehouse, they wouldn't be able to fit a dozen characters into their first game. So they fudged it.

There are seven player characters in the first Mortal Kombat and the most famous two, Sub Zero and Scorpion, are ninjas. The former is blue and the latter is yellow. And that's their only aesthetic difference. The Mortal Kombat guys recycled a character's look because it meant having one extra player character. There's a secret character you can fight in the first MK, Reptile, and he's yet another palette swap of the same ninja. In the second Mortal Kombat game, they'd do the same with the characters Kitana, Mileena and Jade, essentially women who ninja. The third game did this with red and yellow (and, later, purple) robots.

I love thinking about that. What narrative exists in early fighting games is a bunch of self-contradictory hints at story, gleaned through attract mode screens that flashed by and end-of-game victory announcements you'd only see if you were very good at these obscenely difficult games. But this stuff led to comics, TV shows, two different movie series and later games that spend as much time on their stories as they do on fighting mechanics. And all of that lore springs from utilitarian decisions based on arcade machine RAM. There are a bunch of ninjas in Mortal Kombat because ninjas cover up their faces and you'll believe they're different characters if they're wearing different costumes. And because their faces are covered up, MK's developers could use the same actor who played the ninjas again and nobody would notice– the thunder god Raiden is Scorpion is Sub Zero.

There would be purple ninjas (Rain, a Prince reference), red ninjas (Ermac, a reference to some stray "error macro" code in the first game), black ninjas (Noob Saibot, a reference to series creators Ed Boon and John Tobias' last names, spelled backward). These are characters with long, dedicated pages on fan wikis and they were originally put into games simply because they'd physically fit, were easy to make and would add a little more value for the consumer.

I find modern Mortal Kombat games a little gross. The gore is too realistic and there is a stark difference between a quick, cartoony decapitation meant to rev up idiot teens and a long, drawn out torture whose details are based on actual footage and which gave a real animator PTSD. I have a lot of love for the 2021 Mortal Kombat movie, which got closer to my preferred tone. It's hard to get the dial in the right place between disgusting and laughable when contemporary video game graphics are this good, but the need to connect with a broader audience helped keep the most recent film from going to Terrifier levels of gore.

If I'm not good at playing these things, I have to be able to appreciate them for other reasons, and it's easier for me to appreciate what the earlier games were doing than what they've become. When you can do anything, when you have more time and money to make your game, you don't need to cut corners. But that's what I love about those early Mortal Kombat games. As backhanded as this sounds, nobody cut corners better. And this Legacy Collection is the best way to play them, because I won't have to play them. I can just listen to people talk about them. The games require skill I don't have, but I'll gladly spend some time thinking about them.