Mortal Kombat is one of the single most popular and enduring video game franchises of all time, with over a dozen games and millions of sales that’s a lot of money and uppercuts. One of the reasons the series is famous or rather infamous is the inclusion of “Fatalities”, the ability to murder your defeated opponent as a kind of bloody victory dance. Weird then that the creators never expected anyone to find them.
Fatalities were included in the original Mortal Kombat game when the creators tossed around the idea of the final boss, Shang Tsung, cutting off your head with a sword if he managed to beat you. After realising this idea was wicked awesome, someone asked posed the question “what if the player could be this badass too?” we’re paraphrasing here since we assume the original quote had a lot more swear words and animated hand gestures than that quote, but you get the idea.
With that idea firmly in mind, Ed Boon and John Tobias, the creators of the game, set about giving each character a unique finishing move. Oddly despite all the extra effort they went to, to put Fatalities into the game, Tobias has openly expressed in interviews that he honestly never expected anyone to have either the patience of dexterity to find them all.
However players did and according to the man himself the very first Fatality ever performed was done by a 12 year old kid, by accident on the first day the game was ever tested in arcades. Said kid then spent the rest of the day trying to convince other players that he’d discovered a secret way of ripping off people’s heads after a match, even pointing to Tobias (who was there to over see play testing) to back him up. Tobias heroically refused to back the kid up and then spent the next three hours watching him spend every penny he had trying to recreate it. Hey, he was a businessman, not a babysitter.
So just to clarify, Fatalities were included in Mortal Kombat under the assumption no one would ever find them and on literally the first day it was ever played by the public, a 12 year old kid found them.
