Roster of Mortal Kombat fighters

Mortal Kombat

1992video game franchise / catchphraseclassic

Published September 7, 2026

Mortal Kombat is a fighting video game franchise that debuted in arcades on October 8th, 1992, infamous for digitized blood, spinal-rip fatalities and the shouted command "Finish Him." The series pushed U.S. lawmakers toward the creation of the ESRB rating system and spawned some of gaming's most quoted catchphrases, including Scorpion's "Get Over Here!"

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Overview

Mortal Kombat is a fighting video game series built around timed one-on-one matches using kicks, punches and character-specific special moves, but what turned it into internet fodder is the finisher system. When an opponent's health hits zero, the announcer barks "Finish Him" and the winner has a few seconds to input a hidden button combo for a fatality, a gruesome cinematic kill like a spinal rip or a decapitation3. Later games layered on animalities, brutalities, hara-kiris and even a friendship where fighters give each other cakes instead of killing3.

By 2012 the roster had grown to 64 characters, including Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Raiden, Liu Kang, Kitana, Shao Kahn and even crossover fighters from DC Comics3. Two of them carry most of the meme weight online. Scorpion's spear-throw taunt "Get Over Here!" is quoted constantly in gaming blogs and YouTube compilations, and the yellow-ninja-vs-blue-ninja rivalry with Sub-Zero became the visual shorthand for the whole franchise, notably in the snowy forest trailer NetherRealm used to reveal Mortal Kombat X in 20141.

Origin & Background

Platform
Arcade (origin) / Reddit / YouTube (meme spread)
Creator
Ed Boon and John Tobias
Date
1992

Development on Mortal Kombat began in 1991 at Midway with a small team led by Ed Boon, John Tobias, John Vogel and Dan Forden. The original pitch was a tie-in game for the Jean-Claude Van Damme film Universal Soldier, and when that deal fell through the team pivoted to a Street Fighter II competitor built around digitized live-action sprites3. The first Mortal Kombat cabinet hit arcades on October 8th, 1992, with home ports arriving on Genesis, SNES and other consoles the following year3.

The blood and fatalities were the hook from day one. Urban Dictionary entries from the mid-2000s still describe it as a "badass fighting videogame with so much blood and guts it was almost banned from North America," and specifically note U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman's push to ban it2. Those 1993 Senate hearings on Mortal Kombat and Night Trap directly triggered the creation of the ESRB rating system for video games.

How It Spread

The franchise kept iterating for two decades, with more than 20 sequels shipping across PlayStation, Dreamcast, Xbox, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS and beyond3. The 1995 live-action Mortal Kombat film, complete with the techno theme song shouting "Mortal Kombat!", is still cited by fans as one of the better video game movies ever made4. Series co-creator Ed Boon has kept the community fed with roster teases for years, including confirming in a TRMK interview that Mortal Kombat X would pull fighters from Mortal Kombat 4 and later entries5.

Online, the meme footprint grew alongside the games. The Mortal Kombat Wiki launched on January 12th, 20063, the /r/MortalKombat subreddit opened on April 15th, 2010, and the official Facebook page (started May 5th of that year) passed 5.2 million likes by 20143. On October 3rd, 2012, Redditor Ryno3639 posted an animated GIF of the original MK cast dancing at a prom to /r/funny, where it pulled over 14,400 upvotes6. Fan communities also built out on Tumblr, with single-topic blogs like Mortal Kombat Gifs running character montages of Scorpion and other fighters7.

The catchphrases had their own trajectory. "Finish Him" landed on Machinima.com's top ten gaming memes list and ScrewAttack's "Top 10 OMGWTF Moments"3, while Scorpion's "Get Over Here!" made PLAY magazine's roundup of best gaming chat-up lines3. The 2014 reveal trailer for Mortal Kombat X on the Mortal Kombat Community YouTube channel doubled down on the Scorpion vs. Sub-Zero image, staging their fight in a snowy forest1.

How to Use This Meme

As a meme, Mortal Kombat is typically invoked in two ways. The first is the "Finish Him" template, where users pair the announcer's shouted line with any lopsided beatdown, a sports blowout, a debate clip or a cat pouncing on another cat, then imply the follow-up fatality. The second is the Scorpion "Get Over Here!" spear yank, which often gets edited into videos where someone is dramatically pulled toward the camera. Fatality parodies commonly cut in the original 16-bit blood spray or the "FATALITY" text over an unrelated knockout.

Frequently Asked Questions