Finish him! It was a phrase I loved to hear after defeating my opponent in Mortal Kombat. “Left, Right, Up, Down, Left, Up, A, B, B, A” If you press these buttons in the right sequence, and at the right time you would get to see a spectacularly gory fatality, that made the graphics of the early Nintendo look like they should have been rated R. Not everyone could do this, and the codes were not publicly available. They were passed around from one kid to another, on slips of paper handed across schoolroom desks.

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