By contemporary standards, a major Hollywood star like Keanu Reeves headlining a video game (in his case, Cyberpunk 2077 from last year) is not particularly remarkable. In Cyberpunk 2077, the digitised likeness of Reeves is a playable character and, of course, the actor has done extensive voice work to lend star quality to the gameplay.
Back in 1991, however, the idea of playing a video game as a digitised Hollywood star held considerable novelty value, which is why the erstwhile Chicago-based video game company Midway was approached to create a gaming version of the then-upcoming Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Universal Soldier (1992).
Comic book artist John Tobias and programmer Ed Boon thought that featuring Van Damme as a playable character would be a big hit among fans. Van Damme, a skilled martial arts practitioner nicknamed “the muscles from Brussels," was known for introducing a more realistic, brutal form of hand-to-hand combat to Hollywood, courtesy films like Bloodsport (1988).
Unfortunately for Midway, the Van Damme deal never materialised. But Tobias and Boon used the experience to create a new character for the game they ended up developing. The character, Johnny Cage, was a brash, cocky Hollywood martial arts star whose ego often came in the way of his skills — he also shared Van Damme’s initials.
The game that Midway launched eventually, Mortal Kombat (1992), would go on to become one of the most immediately identifiable video game franchises of all time. If you were into one-on-one fighting games in the '90s and 2000s, you were either Team Streetfighter (intense, precise, all about the craftsmanship) or you were a Mortal Kombat loyalist (cartoonishly violent, gory, all about macabre humour and showmanship). Interestingly, Van Damme would go on to star in the film version of Streetfighter a couple of years later, in 1994.
In the almost 30 years since the launch of the original game, Mortal Kombat has grown into a sprawling franchise across media — comics, TV series, and both live-action and animated films. Ahead of the release of Mortal Kombat, a live-action reboot starring Lewis Tan, Jessica McNamee, Joe Taslim and others, here is a primer on the mythology and storytelling of this universe.
Overarching mythologies
In the origin story of Mortal Kombat, there were three primordial sources of power in the universe: in decreasing order of power, these were the villainous One Being, the Titans and finally, and the Elder Gods. At some point, the Titans and the Elder Gods set aside their differences and united against the One Being They managed to split the One Being into six different weapons, called the Kamidogu. Eventually, these six different parts became the six defining realms of the Mortal Kombat universe: Earthrealm, Netherrealm, Outworld, Orderrealm, Chaosrealm, and Edenia. Each of these realms is governed by an Elder God, and each has a unique Kamidogu that represents the essence of the realm. For the Earthrealm, the designated protector is the Raiden (named after the Shinto deity Raijin, the God of thunder and lightning), who defeated his fellow Elder God, the rogue Shinnok who thought he should govern all six of the realms by himself.
All of which brings us to the tournament that lends the game its name — Mortal Kombat itself. According to the original game, the sorcerer Shang Tsung usurped an age-old Shaolin tournament, and transformed it into a battle of the realms. Shang Tsung was acting at the behest of his master, the evil Emperor Shao Kahn, whose magic he channelises. Warriors representing their respective realms could use all manner of magic, supernatural powers and/or futuristic technology to win their contests. If one realm inflicted 10 consecutive defeats upon another, it had the right to conquer that realm. These rules were put into place by the Elder Gods, to minimise bloodshed and inter-realm warfare.
As the original game’s storyline revealed, Shang Tsung used his ‘secret weapon’, the four-armed Goro, to kill Earthrealm’s champion Kung Lao and then inflict nine consecutive defeats upon Earthrealm, before being defeated by the Shaolin monk Liu Kang, who is also the descendant o Kung Lao. In general, there is a fair bit of Shaolin-lore borrowed by the Mortal Kombat universe (culminating in the 2005 Playstation 2 game Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks). The Elder God Raiden, with the help of a group of Shaolin monks, forms the covert ‘White Lotus Society’ after the death of Kung Lao — their purpose is to hand-pick the best fighters on Earthrealm, train them in the ways of Mortal Kombat, and prepare them for a final confrontation with champions from other realms.
White Lotus was the name of the legendary Bak Mei’s clan — Bak Mei, of course, was one of the legendary Five Elders who are said to have survived the massacre of Shaolin Temple by the Qing dynasty in the 17th century. His name is often anglicized as Pai Mei, which is the name Kill Bill fans will remember as Gordon Liu’s character from Kill Bill 2. In the film, Bill (David Carradine) tells Beatrix (Uma Thurman) the story of how Pai Mei single-handedly murdered 60 Shaolin Monks — “(…) Thus began the massacre of Shaolin Temple at the fists of the White Lotus”.
In the sixth game of the series, Mortal Kombat: Deception (2004), the character Shujinko was introduced, and was visually modeled after Pai Mei from the Kill Bill movies, with a Shaolin monk’s attire and prominent, bushy white eyebrows (“bak mei” literally means ‘white eyebrow’ in Cantonese).
Earthrealm champions, Outworld enforcers, and crossovers
The mortals representing Earthrealm in Mortal Kombat were all given their own back stories in the original game — this would happen via ‘fight prologues’ and in-game introductions, which you could technically skip (I never did). Apart from Johnny Cage and Liu Kang, the other two human playable characters in Mortal Kombat (1992) were Kano and Sonya Blade. The Outworld enforcers Sub-Zero (real name: Bi-Han) and Scorpion made up the rest of the lineup. Scorpion can manifest a Kunai, a Japanese roped knife out of his hand, while Sub-Zero can insta-freeze his opponents. Scorpion later turns against Sub-Zero and the Emperor after it is revealed that he is an ‘undead ninja’ seeking revenge against Sub-Zero for killing him with treachery (a variant of this legend forms the opening scene of the 2021 film Mortal Kombat).
Sonya Blade, the only female character from the original lineup, is a commanding officer in the United States Special Forces. Her aim in the original trilogy of games, and for much of its successors, is to bring the villainous, eye-patch wearing Kano to justice. In later games, she is joined in this quest by her military colleague Jax, who has a pair of bionic arms. Kano (real name: Kane) is a former mob boss who sets up a criminal society called Black Dragon. In the game Mortal Kombat III, Kano joins forces with Outworld emperor Shao Kahn, and becomes his new General.
The character of Kano also signaled the willingness of Mortal Kombat to borrow from mythologies the world over, not just martial arts narratives from Asia. Kano, who could shoot laser beams from his eye-patch, is clearly a reference to the Biblical Cain, the first murderer known to humanity (he killed his brother Abel). Cain is generally portrayed with an eye-patch in illustrations.
This borrowing tendency culminated in the 2008 crossover game Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe, where the Superman villain Darkseid merges with the Mortal Kombat villain Shao Kahn to form the entity called Dark Kahn. The mere existence of Dark Kahn causes the two universes to start merging as well — if this process is allowed to continue, both universes will be destroyed. For fans, the crossover presented the opportunity to play out fight scenarios that were hitherto the stuff of online message boards. Liu Kang vs The Joker, Wonder Woman vs Sonya Blade, Raiden vs The Flash — the possibilities were mind-boggling and the gameplay suitably amped-up (for the first time in the series, mid-air free fall fights were possible, which suited someone like Batman for instance; it leveled the playing field for characters with no supernatural abilities).
The chief strength of the 1995 film Mortal Kombat (directed by Paul WS Anderson, who would go on to direct the Resident Evil movies) was its faithfulness to the original video game and its first sequel. It used the iconic theme song in an almost unchanged way. It fleshed out the characters’ back stories to a T, leaning into the ridiculous portions instead of giving them a more screen-friendly twist. It was led by great performances by Robin Shou (incidentally, the first Asian lead of a major Hollywood blockbuster) and Christopher Lambert, who played Lord Raiden with rare gusto.
Also, for its time, the film had fantastic special effects and well-shot ‘wire fu’ sequences. ‘Wire fu’ refers to the technique popularised by Hong Kong martial arts films of the 1970s onwards, shooting Kung fu fights with extensive usage of wires.
It was not until The Matrix that wire fu exploded onto the Hollywood consciousness, but Mortal Kombat was the first blockbuster (it was one of the biggest hits of the year) to employ the technique.
Like a lot of cult classics, the dominant critical opinion of the film has improved considerably down the years. So much so that in 2020, on the 25th anniversary of the film, Rotten Tomatoes released a podcast called “Rotten Tomatoes score is wrong about Mortal Kombat”; following its 1995 release, only 42 percent of critics had given Mortal Kombat a favourable review. All that has changed now, however, which means that that Mortal Kombat (2021) has a tough act to follow. Given that it will also be released on HBO Max, fan feedback will be swift and brutal — but then again, Mortal Kombat has never shied away from swift and brutal.
Morta Kombat released in Indian cinemas on 23 April.
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