Mortal Kombat · Midway · 1992
Midway's laminated move cards for Mortal Kombat arcade cabinets were the primary information delivery system for the game's fatalities — the finishing moves whose deliberate withholding created the first viral gaming secret of the home console era.
Mortal Kombat's fatality finishing moves were a deliberate design secret. Midway programmed the moves into the game but did not include their inputs in the arcade cabinet's standard move documentation — the laminated cards attached to the cabinet showed character special moves but withheld the fatality commands. This withholding was a deliberate marketing decision: players who discovered that fatalities existed would tell other players, who would come to arcades to see them, generating word-of-mouth that the game's brutal spectacle would then sustain. The move cards' conspicuous absence of fatality information made the secret more conspicuous — players understood that something was missing. The eventual home console releases and the cottage industry of hint hotlines and gaming magazine reveals created a secondary market for fatality information that Midway had deliberately manufactured by withholding it from the primary source.
Remembered as the most famous example of deliberate information withholding in gaming history — the absence of fatality documentation from the move cards was itself a marketing tool that created the franchise's first cultural moment.
Midway's decision to withhold fatality inputs from Mortal Kombat's official documentation was a calculated risk. The fatalities required moderately precise input sequences — standing at specific distances, executing multi-button combinations — that most players would not discover through random experimentation. Withholding the commands meant that only players who had received the information from another source could reliably execute them, creating a social dynamic in which knowing the fatalities was a form of playground currency.
The strategy worked because the fatalities were genuinely spectacular by the standards of early 1990s arcade games. Digitised graphics of apparent humans being graphically killed were new; the combination of real photography and explicit violence was without precedent in a mainstream arcade cabinet. Players who witnessed a fatality for the first time had an unambiguous motivation to find out how to perform it — and Midway's withholding of the information ensured they would have to do significant work to find out.
Midway's information withholding created demand that the gaming press immediately moved to supply. Nintendo Power, GamePro, and Electronic Gaming Monthly all published dedicated Mortal Kombat fatality guides, driving newsstand sales from players specifically seeking the information the cabinet cards had not provided. This was a symbiotic relationship: Midway's secrecy generated press interest that extended the game's media presence beyond what straightforward documentation would have produced.
Nintendo's hint line — 1-900-288-0707, accessible at premium telephone rates — also benefited directly from the fatality secrecy. Mortal Kombat fatality inquiries were among the most frequent calls, and the revenue from those calls was significant. Midway had effectively subsidised both the gaming press and Nintendo's hint business through a single deliberate documentation omission. The lesson was not lost on subsequent fighting game publishers: the fighting game guide genre developed in part as a direct response to a market that Mortal Kombat had demonstrated existed.