Mother Sparker

Soon as Mooch peers round the wall in Production, it’s a go. Light the pads up. Check the door. Load the beast. Coco-Pop carries the PlayStation over every day in a Borussia Dortmund-branded backpack, black and yellow, old faithful. Sometimes, worried Pop might wake up on the wrong side of his bed, I feel his bag up to make sure it’s there. Like overseas airport security padding down a minority at least a couple times. The PS4 still feels like such space-tech, an imperfect astral shard or crystal ultimately coated in earthly gum. Ali re-jigs his workspace to accommodate it. Loops the HDMI and the power cord through a peep in the desk for all sorts of cables. Turns his third monitor around to face the whiteboard. One creative says a couple video edits are due; another declares, WE ARE LEGION. Let there be Mortal Kombat and all.

Upper management’s grunted once or twice to the Creative Director about all the noise. They’ve even ventured unfounded accusations of illicit gaming, outside of 1 o’clock. Those are tricky shindigs to swing. Once everybody’s backs face the whiteboard, we've got to keep our asses out of sight of the door, which is transparent, operated via thumb, basic AI that thanks you for your DNA when it grants you entry. 

Somebody’s got to be the lookout. Shout a holler when someone from Marketing swings by ‘cause Marketing’s full of snitches. The safe word’s usually ‘dog’, dragged out some in the middle, named for that rush attack Kotal Kahn will launch with minimal instruction. There’re rumours ‘too much gaming’ has come up in board meetings but the creative department never surrenders. Let there be, I say, Mortal Kombat.

You’ve probably got to see it to believe it, but it takes a perfect beat-em-up engine to keep us out the cafeteria that long. In the local language menya translates as ‘beat’, so the pastime itself is ever so scholastically referred to as menyery. Afford all that careless bloodshed some class, the sense that it’s being executed by gentlemen. That’s not where it ends with the terminology. ‘Toom-toom’ for the knee combo Baraka, the refugee with the claws and the fangs, will inflict upon a kombatant with a simple double-tap. ‘Dooog’ for that Kotal Kahn rush. ‘Tree’ for the devastating suplex Noob Saibot will invert a dude’s whole body with. The fatal blow is referred to as a ‘spark’ in these parts, and anyone who employs it during crunch time is deemed a ‘mother-sparker’.

Most times you enhance a hit, Mortal Kombat 11 is so sumptuous a simulation it will slow down time, zoom in on your enemy’s guts, and chop and screw the sound effect like it’s Houston-area rap music. Coco-Pop’s got everybody yelling “your choist” when it happens ‘cause hell, why not butcher the Queen’s language while we’re at it. 

There’s an identity politics to it too. Preferences evolve constantly, but everybody’s got a core character they’ll turn to when they need a win. Everybody’s got a fighting style or tactic that’s responsible for some degree of fanfare or consternation. People made fun of my so-called button-bashing with Kung Lao ’til it turned out I could devise an 18-hit combo on command. Mooch will talk the most relentless trash if he takes your head off with a brutality; it’s practically Christmas when he wheels away with it, giggling like a child. 

Zac’s still king of the spammers, and the zoners, despite recently reforming from the practise of camping in Call of Duty. You confess your sins online to a High Priest of Gaming, I figure: some 12-year old Fortnite aficionado in Amsterdam or Helsinki. You take a little break from needing to win all the time. You re-sit an empathy exam via the most patient girlfriend in the world. I imagine that’s how it works. 

“I just think there’s a certain respect we’re meant to afford each other, if we’re going to do this shit, well, every day.” My treatise against the practise of zoning - launching endless projectiles from a safe distance - makes me the Martin Luther King Jr. of Mortal Kombat. “It’s a more beautiful game when we fight with honour.”

Pop rolls his eyes.

“Okay, Malcolm X,” he says, and I roll my eyes in the opposite direction. “Honour. Respect.”

“Common decency,” I add, believing I’m getting somewhere.

“Don’t you think it behooves your movement, which has lasted several tiring weeks now, to just let everyone express themselves however they please?”

“Zac’s literally screaming into the void, if that’s what you call expression.”

“Actually, you are.”

“My fighting style just doesn’t jibe with all that bullshit.”

“And what fighting style might button-bashing be exactly?”

I’m pretty goddamn beautiful when I’m in motion. I’ll connect what feels like a thousand sucker punches, follow you into the air, connect what feels like a thousand more before we hit the ground. But I’m no Coco-Pop, who’ll spin carnage out of nothing and render the block button irrelevant. I’m no Mooch, no Scorpion, the blood-thirst balletic when he lights his chains up and swings them around. Certainly I’m nowhere near as cynical a player as Zac is, Zac who doesn’t mind gaming the algorithm to establish dominion. Mooch tosses the controller to one side, while Pop and I iron out a Declaration of Independence, a Constitution, a Magna Karta.

“It’s like fighting a fucking zombie, I swear!”

I smile at Pop because I’ve told him so, several times.

*

Sub-Zero slides across the gauntlet, seizes Scorpion’s leg, lifts his entire frame off the ground, and then launches it at a curtain of ice. Pop enhances the sequence, of course. The game moans in slow motion as Sub-Zero’s fist drills Scorpion in the sternum and thus shatters the wintry architecture. It’s all so exquisitely seamless. Mooch always has a bit of a rally in him, though, and I volunteer commentary on occasion. As one of the office’s lesser kombatants, it’s the least I can do.

“Kick. Kick. Punch. Block. Block. Block. Your jawwww … Kick. Kick. Flame. Ice. Ice. Flame. Rope. Rope. Rope. Chain. Chain. Chain-gang. Kick. Kick. Boot. Kick. Boot. Your choist. Grip. Spark. Sini. Chain. Sini. Ice. Dagger. Your face. Upper-cut. Combo. Combo. Your jawwww. Round, Sub-Zero. Mercy …”

Sini’s a fragment of the Nyanja phrasing for, “I’d rather not,” and also how we reject a grab maneuver. The one unspoken rule of Mortal Kombat is that when you overcome an opponent, mercy must be afforded - but it’s granted at the victor’s discretion, nevertheless. The house will restore about an eighth of your health, to potentially alter the outcome of agonisingly close contests or to at least reclaim some dignity. Zac V Mooch, a rivalry of note, is famous for lacking this charity. 

“Exay, toss mercy, what the fuck!”

This is what it sounds like when I narrate a match in which Zac happens to be competing.

“Kwempa. Kwempa. Kwempa. Kwempa. Kwempa.” 

Kwempa’s Nyanja for, I don’t know, lower body leg sweep.

“Fist. Fist. Fist. Fist. Fist … uhhh, fist.”

This really isn’t what it sounds like.

“Laser. Laser. Laser. Laser. Laser. Laser. Laser. Laser. Laser. Laser. Round, Kano.”

Maybe Zac’s true genius is that he up and turned Mortal Kombat into Modern Warfare, right under our noses.

Every now and then Mwang-Mwang, the intern, will materialise and learn a combo or two. She hates her nickname but there’s nothing she can do about it now. Perhaps one day she could challenge and conquer Mooch, who christened her thus, for the right to renounce that title. She’s learnt how to cascade time through sliding kicks and pole vaults with Jade, almost as quickly as she’s learnt to manage creative traffic. Even amidst an education in Mortal Kombat, it’s remarkable how awesome everything looks: eleven Jades hopping dimensions to plant eleven boots on one face. 

Like me, Ian the graphic designer is a bit of a basher - but also a peculiar customer. In FIFA, he’ll sprint from one goal-mouth to the other, unbothered by the concept of defence. In Mortal Kombat, he’ll haul miracles right out his ass with Erron Black: a cowboy who ought have no business in a tournament that pits spectral realms against one another. Saying it out loud, putting it that way … Black and Ian actually make perfect sense together. 

Ian and I also have Kung Lao in common. There are now several different practitioners of his quote, unquote, hat tricks. I’ll take you on a Disneyland ride with my combos, right across a kombat venue. Ian barely ever blocks. Mapaalo even less so, I think ‘cause he loses himself in the adrenaline rush of it all. Ali’s a natural engineer, always picking things apart — for a living when he directs television ads, and for fun when he turns Kung Lao’s judo chops into cranial earthquakes. I hate sharing the character with all these motherfuckers but hey. 

Ali and Pop, the department’s finest kombatants, consider which moves to attempt on one another before they duel. Shall I raise your Liu Kang one Fujin, or perhaps counter your Sonya Blade with a splash of Cassie Cage? Watching them work is to witness mastery mingle with camaraderie, and it affirms Mortal Kombat 11’s status as king of the fighters. 

It’s a few minutes past our lunch break and there’s one last score to settle. The door goes, “Thank you,” meaning an intruder approaches. Controllers drop like grenades. Volume is willed downwards. Chairs swivel like sports cars round tight corners. Heads duck behind iMac monitors. None of us can ever get enough. I stroll into supermarkets with the game’s soundtrack in my ears on weekends, the music so menacing it feels like no one there knows what’s coming.