Memorable Music

Mortal Kombat‘s music is… special. It’s not bad, but it’s not stellar either. It serves its purpose of setting the tone and atmosphere of the fights. Hell, one of you are going to be killed by the end of it. As a matter of fact, music wasn’t the MK‘s series strong suit. MK3 had better music, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. Now it’s time for some MK1 music.

The look and atmosphere of Mortal Kombat can be described as something of a Kung-Fu parody. While in recent year the game has taken one a more serious tone, back then this was how the game kinda felt. This rings true with the gong that introduced players to selecting their Kombatant. The song had a paradoxically primal sound. It sounded like a kung-fu movie, but someone was going to die a horrible, horrible death. Unfortunately, this theme has been largely forgotten in favor of the later MK games. But to the most hardcore, this was the gong that started the head chopping.

Here’s one song that has stood the test of time in the MK series. Its silent percussion and melody at the very beginning made the announcer’s “FIGHT” very audible. The bassline the carried the melody was like an omen, carrying on the theme of “someone’s gonna die.” It maintains that primal sound of the player select screen and is even more unsettling as kombat is taking playing on a clear, sunny day in the courtyard. It sets the mood very well in that even on the clearest day, there’s no room for becoming soft in a fight to the death.

Ah the pit. A staple in every MK game. Here you have a narrow battlefield to work with, and the one that fails faces a descent to their death. It sorta brought back memories of the old American Gladiator event “Joust,” it that there were two guys standing on two high platforms and the goal was to knock the other person off his platform. The same rang true here, hence why many player like the Pit stages. The music for this has a sort of “height” to it at the beginning. It’s hard to explain, but if you play on the stage you’ll get what I mean. The song itself is pretty lackluster, only being remembered as the song that played on The Pit.

The release of MK was a major milestone for gaming. While controversial for its violence, it helped birth a centralized rating system that has been in use to this day. It became a pop culture phenomenon spawning two movies, a cartoon, and comics. And it started a long line of imitation fighting games that hoped to capitalize on MK‘s blood and gore like Kasumi Ninja, Time Killers, and the unreleased-for-a-very-good-reason Tattooed Assassins. But there was one game that some have viewed as a great alternative to MK, one that helped break the combo of bad MK knock-offs. Next week, we continue Fighting February with one hell of a combo.