A Fatality, which required depleting all of the opponent's health and a secret command input in order to use, would defeat the opponent in a spectacularly brutal fashion. Mortal Kombat also pioneered the Finishing Move in the form of Fatalities, one of the franchise's defining features. Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance added the ability for each character to switch between three different fighting styles, greatly expanding the combat options and combo ability of every character. Early entries in the series had characters play largely similarly, differing mostly in Specials. Mortal Kombat's gameplay is relatively simple in comparison to other fighting games, as it uses four attack buttons and a dedicated block button as opposed to the traditional six attack buttons seen in series like Street Fighter. The latest game in the series is Mortal Kombat 11. Mortal Kombat 4 was the first game in the series to use 3D models. The first entry to the series, known simply as Mortal Kombat, was released in arcades on October 8th 1992 and featured digitized graphics instead of the usual hand-drawn sprites present in other fighting games at the time. Mortal Kombat (commonly abbreviated to MK) is an American fighting game series created by Midway Games (now known as NetherRealm Studios) that is best known for its excessively graphic content that ultimately contributed to the founding of the ESRB rating system.
