Mortal Kombat is an American video game franchise, developed by Midway

Games' Chicago studio. In 2011, following Midway's bankruptcy, the Mortal Kombat development
team were acquired by Warner Brothers, and turned intoNetherRealm Studios, the game becoming
a property of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.
The development of the first game was originally based on an idea by Ed Boon and John Tobias of
making a video game starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, but that idea fell through and a science
fantasy-themed fighting game titled Mortal Kombat was created instead and released in 1992. The
original game has spawned many sequels and has been spun off into several action-adventure
games, films (animated and live-action with its own sequel), and television series (animatedand live-
action). Other spin-offs include various comic book series, a card game and a live-action tour. Along
withCapcom's Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat has become one of the most successful and influential
fighting franchises in the history of video games.
The series is known for its high levels of bloody violence, including, most notably, its Fatalities
finishing moves, requiring a sequence of buttons to perform, which, in part, led to the creation of
the ESRB video game rating system. The series name itself is also known for using the letter "K" in
place of "C" for the hard C sound, thus intentionally misspelling the word "combat", as well as other
words with the hard C sound within later games in the series. Early games in the series were
especially noted for its realistic digitized sprites (which differentiated it from its contemporaries' hand-
drawn sprites) and an extensive use of palette swapping to create new characters.