Good morning.
American here.. I just woke up.
And yeah, it's not Mortal Kombat.
No one lined up in arcades here for Mortal Kombat like they lined up for Street Fighter 2.
How many sports stars throw out Scorpion's spear on the field as a celebratory gesture?
No one that's who.
Hadoukens on the other hand?
It's no contest, it's Street Fighter.
The Mortal Kombat guys wanted Jean Claud Van Damme to reprise his Bloodsport role for their "Kumite" game, but did JCVD do that?
No.
He went and made a Street Fighter movie.
Even JCVD knew it's Street Fighter.
the Mortal Kombat movie was the better of the two movies .. that theme song... so good
Can't help but feel the MK series dodged a major bullet by not getting him on board. Would the series have taken off with him as the face of it, or would it have been another throwaway fighter that retro sites would be referring to as 'that Van Damme fighting game?'
Iconic in the cultural sense I think is definitely MK. I think Street Fighter II is definitely the better game and the franchise is the iconic fighting game franchise which is probably why it has such an overwhelming lead.
And they chose Mortal Kombat....I can see why...its depictions of gratuitous violence had bigger social repercussions (ESRB etc) than Street Fighter 2. But the game that made fighting games a cultural gaming phenomenon with folk going to compete against each other at the local arcade was SF2...
Great, but what does that have to do with the video? SF2 didn't lose the 1991 choice to MK, it lost to Sonic the Hedgehog. Which had a hit movie this year. In 2020.
MK has basically been more popular than SF since the beginning. Even during the lean years between 4-8 it did better than SF did (which were also SF's worst sales period)
Mortal Kombat always seemed to have more of a mainstream cross-media presence to me. The lack of arcade culture in the US/Canada might be part of it. I have no doubt that Street Fighter is more iconic in places like SEA.
The ESRB here exists because of the MK controversy.
Chun Li and Ryu are certainly iconic. Ken? Not so much imo.
But there's honestly no way of measuring this. I will say that Mortal Kombat remained red hot, while Street Fighter waned after after 2 - so I think that's cause for MK to be considered more iconic. It had a larger audience, at least in the west.
Great, but what does that have to do with the video? SF2 didn't lose the 1991 choice to MK, it lost to Sonic the Hedgehog. Which had a hit movie this year. In 2020.
Mk made their list of the most iconic games...SF2 didn't...and if you watch the video they don't say anything like 'SF2 is no less iconic than MK when it comes to fighting games... but it released a year earlier, the same year as Sonic which we feel has the upper hand'...so they are tacitly stating that MK was more iconic..
MK has basically been more popular than SF since the beginning. Even during the lean years between 4-8 it did better than SF did (which were also SF's worst sales period)
How is this even a question? It's Street Fighter II and it's not even close. That's not to undersell Mortal Kombat's massive cultural influence -- in America, at least -- but Street Fighter II was an outright phenomenon worldwide and remains the single most important game in its genre to this day.
Like, my grandmother knows Mortal Kombat. She doesn't know Street Fighter. You didn't have politicians on TV warning parents about the dangerous high-impact violence of Street Fighter. Congress was meeting about Mortal Kombat and changed the way we rate and consume video games far BEYOND the fighting game genre.
I know that's mostly in America, though.
Street Fighter was definitely the more INFLUENTIAL game with the more global outreach, but in many places Mortal Kombat surpassed it in iconography.
I mean, they could literally sell merch based just on the logo alone. I had a teaser poster for the movie that was ONLY the logo.
Both are great and iconic games though. Obviously, the fighting game genre owes more to SF2, but outside of gaming, I think more non-gamers in the west were familiar with Mortal Kombat.
