Midway answered critics of Mortal Kombat's blood and gore with--you guessed it--even more blood and gore in Mortal Kombat II. Finish Him! There's a reason Midway was able to ship Mortal Kombat II out to arcades just a year after the original game came out: The first release of MKII was effectively a public beta test. Version 1.4 of the MKII arcade board featured few fatalities and a whole lot of show-stopping bugs. Thankfully, most of the fighters' moves were functional, so you could at least have a decent match. Unfortunately, if you managed to beat Shao Kahn, you didn't even get an ending. It wasn't until two revisions later that the moves and finishing moves were finalized, and it took even one more version to get all the bugs and last-minute additions taken care of. Fans of MKII were always checking to see if their arcades had gotten the latest revisions to the game as development continued. MKII was chock full of secret moves and characters like Smoke, seen here peeking out from behind a tree. In fact, the way new secrets kept popping up in Mortal Kombat II (over a period of months) gave rise to a huge number of rumors about the game, most of which were unfounded. Many players swore you could find a way to play as Kano, the thief from the first game who was imprisoned in one background by Shao Kahn. The service menu in the game even included a "Kano Transformations" statistic, placed there solely to mislead overeager players who believed that Shang Tsung could, in fact, transform into Kano. Most of the rumored secret characters (Goro?) and finishing moves (brutalities?) were eventually proven false, but that didn't stop legions of trick hunters who continued to plumb the game for new secrets until the release of Mortal Kombat 3. Mortal Kombat II's fatalities were just that much gorier and better than those of the original (and there were more of them, too).

If you had to trace the debate on excessive violence in video games back to a single game, that game would be Mortal Kombat. Midway's absurdly bloody fighter took arcades by storm in 1992, with its graphic depictions of character-inflicted carnage that included decapitated heads, eviscerated hearts, and buckets of spilled blood. Problem was, Mortal Kombat wasn't exactly the best fighting game. The mechanics were simple and the fighting wooden; sometimes, you felt like the whole game was just a vehicle for the gore. Midway fixed that problem, scarcely a year later, with the aptly titled follow-up: Mortal Kombat II. The sequel balked at the senators, parents' groups, and media watchdogs who had condemned the first game by upping the gore factor considerably. But more importantly, the second installment also brought Mortal Kombat into its own as a fighting series.

Considering how quickly Mortal Kombat II came out after its predecessor, Midway went well above expectations with its creativity and, frankly, the sheer amount of stuff that it put into the game. While Mortal Kombat took place on Earth in a series of bland, gray stone temples, the sequel moved to the twisted, bizarrely colorful Outworld. The varied and strange backgrounds there gave the game a real unique visual character. MKII nearly doubled the number of available player characters as well, and all of the characters had plenty of new and useful moves. The plot involved the Earth warriors from the first game, who were transported to Outworld to fight against Shao Kahn, the oppressive master of the first game's boss, Shang Tsung. In an amusing twist, the shape-shifting Shang Tsung became a playable character, with all of his transformation powers intact. You could actually use him to turn into any other fighter in the game, making him a real Swiss army knife of a character.

The fighting engine in MKII evolved a lot from the specious beginnings of the first game. Everything felt a lot looser, and you were able to create more natural combos, thanks to reduced recovery times for attack moves. This allowed you to string moves together more freely. Fighting system changes, like the turnaround jump kick (which let you jump over an enemy and kick him or her on the way down) and a wider arc for the series' trademark uppercut, made the gameplay a lot more flexible and fast-moving. Suddenly, Mortal Kombat was getting as much attention as a forum for fighting competition as it was for its outlandish depictions of over-the-top violence.

But don't think Midway skimped on the blood 'n' guts in favor of fighting in MKII. To the contrary, every uppercut, jump kick, and roundhouse spilled absurdly huge gouts of blood from the fighters--far more than in the first game. Mortal Kombat II also took the series' trademark fatality finishing moves to the next level. Arms were ripped out of their sockets, characters were cut in half or singed to charred skeletons, and the list goes on and on. Series creators John Tobias and Ed Boon proved they had a sense of humor about the uproar over their games by including kinder, gentler finishers, like the babality, that turned your opponent into a baby. There was also a friendship finisher that offered the defeated enemy a present, a rainbow, or flower (among other strange things). The finishing moves were so funny and varied that they became less of a novelty and more of a way to taunt your opponent after a victory (they were also a solid way of proving you'd learned the game's myriad button combinations).

Mortal Kombat II was so much better, as a sequel, than it had to be that it absolutely deserves a place in the pantheon of all-time classics. Midway could have cranked out a cookie-cutter follow-up with only a few improvements to what was honestly a shaky beginning, but instead, the developers flexed their creative muscle and produced one of the most unique and downright entertaining fighting games ever.

I don't think any one game has ever consumed me more thoroughly than Mortal Kombat II did, way back when. I was in the ninth grade, and I remember, literally, looking at my lunch money as four more games of MKII and deciding I'd rather play than eat. The competition and sense of community around that game was intense, even in the small town in which I lived. I always recognized a ton of people from the local arcade who played it all the time. I hung around that machine so much that a couple of times, the arcade operator actually opened the machine and put in a bunch of free credits for me. I could even beat the game in fewer than 10 minutes, using Raiden. Ah, those were the days.