Mortal Kombat was never supposed to exist. In 1991, a four-man Midway team in Chicago, Ed Boon, John Tobias, John Vogel, and Dan Forden, was assigned a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie tie-in; when the deal collapsed, they spoofed the actor as Johnny Cage, mined Chinese mythology and bootleg Hong Kong fantasy films for lore, and positioned themselves as the gritty anti-Street Fighter. This episode covers how a pinball designer's suggestion to swap a C for a K solved a trademark problem and gave the franchise its signature quirk.

We explore the digitized sprites filmed from real martial artists, the palette-swapping trick that turned one ninja actor into Scorpion, Sub-Zero, and Reptile, the ERMACS diagnostic label that spawned playground rumors, and the fatality system that made secret codes a form of social currency. Then we trace the backlash:  ...