What if every video game ever was as violent as Mortal Kombat? What if every game featured brutal Fatalities that you could perform on your enemies? These are the questions asked by flickr user Tastypants.com in his amazing set of portraits entitled 8-Bit Fatalities.
Welcome to my new project: 8-Bit Fatalities. The idea behind the project stems from growing up at an arcade, and my eventual love affair with Mortal Kombat.
Before Mortal Kombat, violence in video games was largely unheard of or ignored because of its extreme pixelized simplicity. But when Liu Kang and Sub Zero came along to finish off arcade goers the world changed and parents were in an uproar (not mine though).
I couldn't understand what the big deal was though, because as a videogame player all my life I had already considered my actions life and death. Just because you didn't see pac-man violently tearing into the ghosts with his jaws, or mario smashing in the brains of a goomba, thats what I knew was happening. I knew my goal was to kill these enemies, so Mortal Kombat wasn't a big change for me. To me, it was still just a game, where fake deaths happened as part of game progression. To uninformed adults, however, Mortal Kombat was a photo realistic depiction of kids becoming complicit in virtual murders. And so, I decided to show everyone just what I imagined was happening when these little blocky, pixelized abstractions did when they came into contact with eachother, but in a much more visceral, and gory way than could ever be shown with limited graphical systems.
So far, there are only six images in the set, but they're all amazing. Along with the image of Mario smashing the Goomba, there are brutal death scenes depicted from such games as Kid Icarus, Pac Man, Kirby, Dig Dug and another personal favorite of mine . . . Final Fantasy.
Am I completely alone here in imagining that's Black Mage from 8-Bit Theater?
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