Mortal Kombat 11 is poised to melt our faces off with another grisly set of over-the-top fatalities. The signature moves set this series apart so many years ago, and NetherRealm Studios has continued the tradition. Inputting a series of button commands unleashes a gory method to end your bouts — they’re meant to cap-off these epic fights, but sometimes these fatalities are less explosive finish and more wet fart.
Here, we’re celebrating fatalities by deep-diving into the dark years of the MK franchise. These games weren’t always the awesome fighting games we know today, with top-notch production values and slick presentations. There was a time when Mortal Kombat was the joke of the fighting game scene — when the fatalities (and characters) were atrocious. Does anyone remember Dramen? Or Hsu Hao?
During the dark times, the fatalities were often pretty bad. But, even in the golden years you’d find a whole bunch of stinkers. Nowadays, the fatalities are (generally) pretty darn solid — but we’ve dug deep into the series and checked out every single fatality there is to find just to share them. These are the top 16 worst fatalities in the series — the ones that made us laugh the most, the ones that made us go “huh?” and all the ones where everyone explodes into a pile of bones. So, so many piles of bones.
Some of these fatalities are truly stunning in their utter absurdity. In the video above, we breakdown 16 of the silliest fatalities and explain exactly what makes them so goofy. Don’t worry, you won’t find too many from the new games — they’re basically too good to fit into a list like this. Even if a few might just breach the silliness barrier and appear. Some of the newest fatalities are references to old ones; and even more are references to Mortal Kombat memes, before internet memes were a thing. The MK series (and fanbase) are incredibly self-referential, which is why the new games are so lovingly silly.
Checkout the video above for out picks, and watch out for more Mortal Kombat videos when MK11 releases for everyone next week.
