It did for me.
I remember when the original MK came out. I had worked at a mini golf course and arcade throughout high school, but I decided that my first summer home from college I was going to try something else, so I worked at a movie theater. The manager from the arcade called me and told me I had to come see something.
It was Mortal Kombat. He already knew all the moves and fatalities, and he taught me how to play. I loved it. I went back to college and played it all the time at the student arcade on campus. It never really occurred to me how the moves spread around, I figured people just taught each other.
Then MK II came out. It was November and I was in school, not at home, so I didn't have a network of arcade type friends to tap into for tips. I remember when I was home over Thanksgiving break I went to the mall arcade in my hometown and they always had a deal where you get 100 tokens for $10. They were running a new special....if you buy the $10 bag, you not only get 100 tokens, but you get a free printed MKII moves list. It was a home made list made by a guy who worked at the arcade. I remember asking how he got all the moves and someone telling me he pulled them from Prodigy.
A bell went off in my head. My school didn't have Prodigy, of course, but it had something better....tons of computer labs, all hooked up to the internet. Nobody was using the internet back then, the web barely existed at all. But that was okay, all the action was on Usenet. Everyday, I would check rec.games.video.arcade and alt.games.mk to see what had been discovered. By doing this, I was the first person in my college town to do everything. New fatalities, friendships, babalities, everything. And I wasn't a jerk about it. If someone asked how I did it, I shared the information. But I always made sure to memorize everything so I wasn't playing holding onto some dorky list. I probably could have made lists and sold them, but I thought that was in bad taste.
So basically I've been online ever since. MKII is pretty much responsible for making me an extremely early adopter of the internet. I had used IRC a litle bit in 1991 because people were using it to hook-up (at that time, IRC was so tiny that the only places using it were Univ. of Florida, Univ. of Michigan, UCLA, Stanford, and a handful of other places I remember). It was so small you could go to chat room and you didn't have to look that hard before you found someone who was in the same computer lab you were. Pretty amazing. Of course, I didn't even realize what the internet was or how amazing it was at the time, I just knew IRC was a chat program that college kids used. Usenet and MKII were really what blew it all open for me. It's how I transitioned to the web (which back then was only accessible with Lynx, or the brand new graphic interface, Mosaic!) and became internet savvy.
Unfortunately, I never turned that knowledge into billions of dollars during the tech boom. But I did kick everybody's behind in MKII, so that's almost as good!
Does anybody else have any stories about why MK is so significant?
I remember when the original MK came out. I had worked at a mini golf course and arcade throughout high school, but I decided that my first summer home from college I was going to try something else, so I worked at a movie theater. The manager from the arcade called me and told me I had to come see something.
It was Mortal Kombat. He already knew all the moves and fatalities, and he taught me how to play. I loved it. I went back to college and played it all the time at the student arcade on campus. It never really occurred to me how the moves spread around, I figured people just taught each other.
Then MK II came out. It was November and I was in school, not at home, so I didn't have a network of arcade type friends to tap into for tips. I remember when I was home over Thanksgiving break I went to the mall arcade in my hometown and they always had a deal where you get 100 tokens for $10. They were running a new special....if you buy the $10 bag, you not only get 100 tokens, but you get a free printed MKII moves list. It was a home made list made by a guy who worked at the arcade. I remember asking how he got all the moves and someone telling me he pulled them from Prodigy.
A bell went off in my head. My school didn't have Prodigy, of course, but it had something better....tons of computer labs, all hooked up to the internet. Nobody was using the internet back then, the web barely existed at all. But that was okay, all the action was on Usenet. Everyday, I would check rec.games.video.arcade and alt.games.mk to see what had been discovered. By doing this, I was the first person in my college town to do everything. New fatalities, friendships, babalities, everything. And I wasn't a jerk about it. If someone asked how I did it, I shared the information. But I always made sure to memorize everything so I wasn't playing holding onto some dorky list. I probably could have made lists and sold them, but I thought that was in bad taste.
So basically I've been online ever since. MKII is pretty much responsible for making me an extremely early adopter of the internet. I had used IRC a litle bit in 1991 because people were using it to hook-up (at that time, IRC was so tiny that the only places using it were Univ. of Florida, Univ. of Michigan, UCLA, Stanford, and a handful of other places I remember). It was so small you could go to chat room and you didn't have to look that hard before you found someone who was in the same computer lab you were. Pretty amazing. Of course, I didn't even realize what the internet was or how amazing it was at the time, I just knew IRC was a chat program that college kids used. Usenet and MKII were really what blew it all open for me. It's how I transitioned to the web (which back then was only accessible with Lynx, or the brand new graphic interface, Mosaic!) and became internet savvy.
Unfortunately, I never turned that knowledge into billions of dollars during the tech boom. But I did kick everybody's behind in MKII, so that's almost as good!
Does anybody else have any stories about why MK is so significant?