Movies

How Mortal Kombat Went From National Panic to Nostalgic Camp

Even with copious gore, the new movie is too tame to be a controversy. There's a lesson in its trajectory. 

Peter Suderman | 5.8.2026 10:44 AM

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(New Line Cinema/Atomic Monster)

While watching Mortal Kombat II, a cheesy '90s throwback that's essentially a family-friendly fantasy picture with copious R-rated gore, I couldn't help but recall the controversy surrounding the original Mortal Kombat video game. The game was released in the early 1990s, and it was both a runaway hit and a mass cultural panic that approached the level of a national emergency—a matter of congressional inquiry and, eventually, a literal Supreme Court case. 

The game was first released to arcades in 1992, but shortly after it was released for home consoles the following year, Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Democrat from Connecticut and eventual vice presidential nominee, declared his intention to hold hearings on the game.

Lieberman's concern was the game's graphic and realistic violence. Mortal Kombat was a fighting game like so many others, most notably the Street Fighter franchise, pitting two players against each other in a flat, two-dimensional space. But unlike other fighting games, Mortal Kombat used scans of human actors as its characters, and punches, kicks, and other hits were depicted with explosions of blood. Most controversially, the game featured "fatalities" that allowed winning players to input a code that would conclude a match with an extra gory finishing kill—a severed head and spinal cord or torn-out heart. The Kombat was, well, Mortal. 

Lieberman found out about Mortal Kombat when a staffer whose child wanted one for a home system brought the game to his attention. He was a middle-aged centrist Democrat with a penchant for crusades against........

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