A closer look
Ed Boon and John Tobias weren't just pioneers of digitized violence; they were masters of playground psychological warfare. When the original Mortal Kombat arcade cabinets sat idle, the attract mode would cycle through character bios and bloody fatalities. But it also occasionally flashed mysterious strings of text and fake inputs hinting at non-existent characters like Ermac. This drove 1990s kids absolutely feral, resulting in them desperately pumping endless quarters into the machine trying to input button combos that literally did nothing.
