With the announcement of Mortal Kombat 1, the eighteenth game in the franchise, I thought it would be fun to look back at some connective tissue from 30 years ago, when the franchise first started.
When the original Mortal Kombat was about to come out on home consoles, Midway used the tagline “Prepare Yourself” for the gorefest that was about to come to your living room.
This tagline became such a part of MK lore that it got thrown into the dialogue in the first Mortal Kombat film, and was the title of one of the songs on Mortal Kombat: The Album.
When Mortal Kombat II was about to come out on home consoles, they changed the tagline from “Prepare Yourself” to “Nothing, NOTHING, can prepare you!” I really loved the first ad here, as MK was such a huge deal at the time, all you needed was the logo against the lightning storm, and you KNEW what it was an ad for.
Unfortunately, the MK3 print ads did away with any sort of preparation-based slogans. I suppose the claim that NOTHING, NOTHING CAN PREPARE YOU is pretty hard to top. Oh well.
However! When the parodic, stop-motion animated game ClayFighter was getting ready to release its sequel, C2: Judgment Clay, they had their own version of the MKII ads:
Love it.
Mortal Kombat and all related games and characters are owned by Nether Realm Studios, a division of Warner Bros-Discovery. ClayFighter and all related games and characters are owned by Interplay Entertainment.