Top: in Super Mario Bros., obtaining 10 or more lives will cause the life counter to behave oddly. The first digit will become a sprite of a crown and the second digit will behave normally from 10 to 19 lives (being Crown-0 for 10, Crown-1 for 11 etc.), but will become glitched and go through all the graphical tiles in the game after 20 lives (the counter in the screenshot is showing 109 lives). Given this behavior, it is easy to assume that the life counter is completely broken and that no part of this was intentional.
Bottom: in a 2010 interview with the game’s director Shigeru Miyamoto, composer Koji Kondo and programmer Toshihiko Nakago, it was revealed that the crown sprite was actually intentional and was specifically requested by Miyamoto to be placed in the game, which was done at the very end of development. As such, the life counter in the game is a unique combination of intentional odd behavior (the crown appearing at 10 lives) and unintentional odd behavior (the second digit becoming glitched).
Twenty years later, Mortal Kombat is still the best video game movie ever made. And that’s a shame.
I remember the summer of 1995 very well. My first year at college had gone so poorly no institution wanted me on their campus. My father got me a cushy summer job at his law firm only to see me blow nearly my entire paycheck on Magic The Gathering cards. And Mortal Kombat was, unquestionably, the coolest video game series around.
It all started with James Bond, the arbiter of worldliness and all things cool when I was just a kid stuck in suburbia. The movies were frequently shown on TV and I made it a point to watch them all over and over again. One of my early favorites was Live and Let Die: the theme song kicked ass, it was Roger Moore’s first film so he would never look more handsome, and the movie was full of straight-up magic. The bad guys have a fortune teller on their side, and she can seemingly see everything James Bond will do, even from a great distance. The key to her abilities, aside from her being a virgin (which Bond *ahem* takes care of) was her use of tarot cards. Drawing randomly from this special deck of cards, she could literally see the past, the present, and the future.
I had never heard of tarot cards before but I knew I wanted them. I could not have been older than 12.
