TOASTIE :)
A long time ago, in a former Communist country, far far away, two good friends, one age 8(me), the other age 12 (IonuĊ£ Botez, but for keeping things simple, let's call him Johnnie), were coming out of a Nintendo club, after playing an hour of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. What is a Nintendo Club, you ask?
Well, you see, Romania didn't really have al that many arcade parlors. In my home town, Oradea, there was only one, and there were a few arcade cabinets with various games scattered around the city, in seedy bars, next to the poker and slot machines (places that if our parents knew we visited, they would probably have killed us, I mean GAMES IN BARS? BARS FULL OF DRUNK PEOPLE?). And one more thing: arcade coins (they operated here with tokens, not quarters, like Stateside) cost a LOT, so it was a thing we couldn't really afford to visit. So, some smart people, who actually could afford traveling, decided to open their own little business: they bought Super Nintendos (SNES-es) and cartridges, bought som big ass TV's, and rented our bought some places where for a reasonable fee, you could spend your time/money/youth playing SUPER NINTENDO GAMES. Back then consoles cost a fortune, and I didn't have any friends who owned one (ok, there were these Chinese counterfeit cheap NES knock-offs, but those sucked big time).
So instead of wasting our money on tokens which would last directly proportionate to our skill, we used the same money to pay for an hour or two of playing games (you could ask for your cartridge to be changed, if it was available, except for a few games they only had one copy of each).
Paranthesis closed. So as I said we had just finished playing UMK3, and went for a walk, talking about how shitty it was that there is a Sheeva bug in UMK3's tournament mode. And then it dawned on us: wouldn't it be cool if they made a game which actually contained ALL MORTAL KOMBAT CHARACTERS at once, ALL STAGES, ALL costumes/sprites, all FATALITIES, and then some, even for the BOSS CHARACTERS? Mind you, this was in 1995 (we were lucky to get UMK3 at the Nintendo Club only months after release). And we started pitting characters against each other, make-believe battles between MK1 Raiden and Kabal, MK1 Kano vs. MK3 KANO, MK3 Noob Saibot vs. UMK3 Noob Saibot and the list goes on forever. And we fondly remembered the pits, and towers and dead pools and whatnots.
After this brief discussion the topic came up almost all the time. Blame it on youthful imagination but it was one of our prime discussion topics (aside paranormal activities and the X-Files, we were hooked on that too). And we could not let it go, although at the time it only seemed a dream.
Now fast forward one year into the future. We were still religiously attending a weekly service of SNES games (when we could afford it, having finished such stellar games as Pirates of Dark Water and Turtles in Time), when someone told us there's a new place in town and they have both SNES-es and PLAYSTATIONS. We were like "PLAYSTATION???? is that the new NINTENDO?" Initially reluctant to let go of the friend called SNES, we sold our souls for one game:
FUCKING
MORTAL
KOMBAT
TRILOGY
MORTAL
KOMBAT
TRILOGY
IT WAS OUR GAME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Well, not really our game (not all alternative sprites, not all fatalities and other finishes were included, and depending on the platform, the boss characters didn't have fatalities), but so close. This was a dream that came true, the Second coming of Christ.
And we were hooked., it was amazing, the sprites looked better, the sound was better, and although people keep complaining about loading times (like the infamous Shang Tsung morph-into-another-character-load(TM) ) I don't remember it. Or maybe it didn't matter. What mattered is that something that had been persistently on our minds for about a year was there, no longer the figment of our imagination, and we could play it. Of course when we told people about our idea (back when all we had was UMK3) some said it would be cool, others laughed their ass off, saying it's never gonna happen. Well it did.
One nice memory regarding Mortal Kombat Trilogy: since both Johnnie and me came from well lower middle-class families, we couldn't always afford to go play. Actually even the once-a week thing happened courtesy of our grandmothers (may they rest in peace) who would give us their loose change every now and then. So one rainy day, when we were broke, we decided to feed our appetite for destruction by WATCHING OTHERS play MKT. We thought that maybe some were willing to let us play a round or two if we told them moves/fatalities/hints(mind you this was way before we had the internet, and we used to deal in this kind of information, we had notebooks stuffed with moves and combos and secrets and stuff, some of them I still keep to this day). It was cold and wet, but we still decided to go. On the way to the establishment, we found a few bills, about 5000 old Lei (the old romanian currency, not we have new Lei, which is basically a denominated version of the old one), money that was enough for TWO AND A HALF HOURS of play. We never, ever had played this much before at once. It was a gift from (the Elder) God(s), so we did what we were expected to do. Played two and a half hours of MKT. And although that day we paid 5000 old Lei, the memories of that day, and others are priceless. And for everything else there's insert credit card name here
Thanks for reading, and please feel free to share similar experiences in the comments section.
