When I was a senior in high school in 1992, I worked in the local bowling alley which had an arcade in the back of the building. Each month or so, the gaming distributor would bring in some new arcade and pinball games that had just
come out. There were a lot of memorable ones I can envision, like The Addams Family Pinball, Golden Axe: The Revenge
and Virtua Racing to name a few. There was also a game that would change the way we would play arcade games forever.
This game would make people run to the arcade in between bowling shots just to get their quarter on the machine to be next. This game was Mortal Kombat. No other game up to that point where dozens of people waited in line to play like this one did. There were other fighting games to that point like Street Fighter, Fatal Fury, and Pit Fighter, and those games drew a small crowd, but for a very short time. Mortal Kombat, on the other hand, was in the arcade longer than any other game…
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Todd Friedman is heavily involved in the retro gaming community and has co-promoted the Video Game Summit in Chicago, IL for the past 16 years. He also has published 2 books and written for various different gaming magazines including Old School Gamer.
