i remember when i went to this one little kids place for my cousin's birthday party when i was 8. there was this one guy who scared the crap out of me on sight yet i watched him played MK1 and beat it, then play MK2 and beat that, then would go back to MK1. all while picking Scorpion. A couple weeks later my mom showed me an article of where the same guy murdered someone. the newspaper even blamed Mortal Kombat since he would play it all the time.

These are fun to read.
Alas, I have no arcade stories, I've never played Mk on an arcade machine.

neither have I played any in the arcade before. You guys make me jeoulus! I'm only 15 and the closest I got to playing on an arcade was playing MK II on my genesis when i was 4. Too bad i am not 15 in 1994 , i would go every day

Yeah, I'm about the same age as you, Sugarchicken. I did get to play MK in the arcades though. But I was too young to ever be good at it. I remember when MK3 first came out I played it on one of those huge screens. I was about 7 or 8 and I was playing against someone who was probably 18. He didn't want to hurt my feelings, so he let me retreat all the way back into the corner and crouch. He would then just walk at me and I would uppercut him. He let me do that for a round and then he whooped my ass.

i remember my first MK "arcade" experience was back in 1994. Me, my aunt, and my cousin Keith went to a bowling alley that was up the street from his house. Mortal Kombat 2 had just recently hit arcades, and there was an MK2 machine inside the game room of the bowling alley. My cousin and I got to play it for a LITTLE bit after we finished bowling, but then we had to leave. The next day (I spent the night at Keith's house), we WALKED back to the bowling alley with about $5 each, and went RIGHT back to the game and played it for like...2 hours, lol. We had played Mortal Kombat 1 for SNES before (MK2 was the first ARCADE version we had played), so when we saw that MK2 had 12 fighters to choose from, we were like..."LOOK AT ALL THESE PEOPLE!" LOL NOW-days, 12 fighters is NOTHING compared to the other MK games...but back THEN...it was like "WHOA!". The first few times we played MK2 at the arcades, we didnt know ANY finishing moves. So later on, I got my mom to take me to Walden Books at the mall by my house, and buy me the Mortal Kombat 2 Stratagy Guide. A couple weeks later, I go back to Keith's house, we go back to the arcade to play MK2...w/ the MK2 book with us, and honestly...we must have pulled off about 50% of all the finishing moves in the whole game, lol We actually took turns beating each other so we could try all the different finishing moves, haha. My most memorable Fatality that we pulled off that day was Liu Kang's dragon fatality. That was SOOO COOL!
And the rest...is history...
And yes...as SOON as MK2 came out for home platforms, we got it for SNES, and again..played it for hours and hours and hours...

-Matt

Nice story.

*sniffle* I... miss the arcades so damn much... *sniffle* and the worst part is... I never got to play them like you guys did *sniffle* and now they'll probably never do arcades again!!!!!!! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! I wish I could time travel!

Fortunately for some of us the arcade days still are going on, in the form of tournaments!

Matt

The only decent story I have is when I used to play UMK3 at a bowling alley every Saturday night where there'd be about 15 people gathered around the machine. I always used Ermac and I was pretty decent, but my one buddy was never able to beat me, and he finally got me with robot Smoke's spear in round three and went for the uppercut to finish me and hit the Start button instead of the HighPunch. So by the time he realized it and hit the HP, I had already ducked and uppercutted him back. He almost lost it, ready to punch me in the head.

We all still play UMK3 every weekend, I bought a machine on Ebay and it was the best thing I ever bought. We still get a group of like 6 or 7 people getting some pretty fuckin intense matches going on. It sucks cus the machine is at my 3 friends' house, so they've all gotten better than me. If we didn't have girlfriends screaming at us at 4 AM to quit, we'd probably play the game for days on end.