I was so ridiculously hyped for the original Mortal Kombat to drop on consoles back in the day. That commercial I just posted was caused me to nearly throw my family's TV through the front window based on hype alone. I was lucky enough to experience Mortal Kombat in the arcade (and by arcade I mean local pizza joint), so I already knew what it was. I was also lucky enough to acquire the game AND Super Street Fighter II: Turbo on the actual famed Mortal Monday (thank you grandma)! My favorite will always be Mortal Kombat II, but Mortal Kombat was the first launch even I was ever apart of, which in those days was incredibly rare.

Now to start some kontroversy.

At the time, I had a SNES. While I would later get a Genesis, I never got the Genesis version. For those of you who are young, lived under a rock, or just don't remember, the Genesis version had a blood code in it which let the player experience the game unedited in terms of violence. The SNES version, meanwhile, had a sweat looking substance come out of kombatants when they got hit and some fatalities were edited.

I liked the SNES version better.

But I didn't have a Genesis, you say! It had the real version, you say! Well, at that time, my SNES was mainly housed at my greatgrandmother's house. I had a friend across the street that had a Genesis. So combined, we had access to both consoles (until we would both get the other eventually). He had the Genesis version, obviously.

Anyway, while it was cool to see blood and the actual fatalities, I felt the animation was far superior on the SNES version (even with a little lag). I also thought the sound, music, and especially the amount of colors was truer to the arcade experience. Seriously, go back and look at the Genesis version. The console was FANTASIC, but there were way more cut corners porting that version (not counting the edited content in the SNES version).

While some of the edited fatalities were downright silly on SNES, it added an element of humor to the game. I mean, using Johnny Cage's leg hump fatality, especially against Kano, still makes me laugh until the point of tears to this day. Also, I felt that the non-silly edited fatalities were much better. The unedited version of Mortal Kombat had a lot of fatalities were it involved the head coming off the body somehow.

Both Sub Zero and Raiden had a fatality that affected the head along with Johnny Cage. Seeing the freeze and shatter fatality (and MKII had a similar fatality) from Sub Zero was more chilling to me (pun intended) and watching Raiden turn an enemy to dust sans skull was much more fitting with his theme.

I won't lie. I wished there was actual blood in that version, and ultimately, I prefer the arcade version since it is available to me now. But between the SNES and Genesis version? I'll take the SNES version, even if it was edited.