Back in 1995, the only game series that my friends and I cared about was Mortal Kombat.  With the exception of the occasional game of NHL 95, our Sega Genesises (Genesi?) were practically hardwired to play MK2.  My friends Steve and Sean and I all played together at our friend Nick’s house, logging countless hours perfecting our leg sweeps, ice balls, uppercuts and Fatalities.  All of us were experts after a few months with the game, and almost every head-to-head battle ended with the narrowest of margins of victory.  Once Mortal Kombat 3 was released in arcades, we knew it would only be a matter of time before a console version was made available.  After six long months, our wish was granted, and MK3 hit store shelves.  While the game was available for the Genesis, we decided it was time to upgrade, and convinced our friend Nick (the only one of us with a job, and, therefore, more than 50 cents to his name) to purchase a brand new Sony PlayStation and a copy of the game.  When we got it home, we essentially spent the next week doing nothing but learning the new combo mechanics, new characters, and the new Fatalities, Animalities, Friendships, and Babalities.  Once we had all these down it was time to get serious; it was tournament time.

With all four competitors using the game’s 15 playable characters against each other, a tournament like this required one hell of a bracket sheet.  Steve took it upon himself to lay out this Brobdignagian field of 60, as well as outline the tournament’s rules.  Each competitor would pit every character against every other character as controlled by each other competitor.  This made for a total of about eight thousand possible matchups.  Thankfully, the rules of the tourney made sure that the competition wouldn’t take the rest of our lives.  Any player who lost with a character received a strike with that character.  Three strikes, and you can no longer use that character.  If you lost with a character and your opponent managed to pull off a Fatality, the losing character was immediately given three strikes, and was taken of the board.  If you managed to pull off a Friendship or a Babality, you could remove a strike from any of your characters, with all three strikes needing removal before a character was eligible for play again.  Finally, anyone who was able to pull off a difficult Animality was given the option to reinstate one of their characters immediately, removing up to three strikes at once.  It sounds confusing, but once we got started, everything made perfect sense, and our mega-bracket filled up nicely.

At the start of the tourney, I considered myself to be either the best or second best player in the group.  I had mastered several characters, such as Nightwolf, Sub-Zero, Sheeva, Kitana and, especially, Kabal, and was relatively proficient with almost everyone in the game.  I figured that I might lose out to Steve in the end, as he was able to utilize pretty much every combo and Fatality in the game, but I saw myself as a superior strategist and tactician, giving me a slight edge.  Either way, I knew I could walk all over Sean and Nick, guaranteeing at least a second-place finish.  Of course, this all turned out to be meaningless, as I quickly began losing favorite characters to Fatalities, and before I knew what hit me, I was down to Kano, Sindel and Nightwolf, while no one else had lost more than a few characters.  I was stunned, distraught and downright pissed off.  As my games became less frequent, and I was forced to sit and watch everyone else play, I grew more and more depressed about my shortcomings in a game in which I had invested so much time and attention.  I decided that, despite my limited roster and awful performance so far, I was going to step up my game and get right back in this thing.  I practiced day and night, learning every nuance of the few characters I had left.  I knew every single –ality there was to know for my sad little band of survivors, and I was determined to start winning some characters back. 

The next time we got together, I was pumped to reclaim some ground.  My first match featured my Nightwolf against Steve’s Stryker.  No one liked Stryker, so this looked to be a cakewalk, and a nice way to get back on track.  Of course, two humiliating rounds later, and Stryker had not only beaten my best remaining character, he had turned into a dinosaur and bitten my head off- Animality.  All of my optimism disappeared, and over the period of that day, I saw my entire roster eliminated, guaranteeing me a last-place finish.

I still love the MK series, and have bought every version of the game since, but I will always feel a certain sting whenever I play against any of those guys (who are all still close friends).  Also, as a result of this tournament, I have an undying hatred for the man known as Kurtis Stryker.

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