LAKE COUNTY FF REVIEW: Joshua Y Tsui’s INSERT COIN delivers a history of violence in arcade games
When Mortal Kombat first hit arcades, it was shocking even to me, a teen raised on slasher movies and gangsta rap. Photo-digitized human beings punching rain-clouds of blood out of each other, only to finally rip out a spine or crush a beating heart..and kids were playing it. Even as a fervent opponent of censorship, I wondered if it was a good idea. Later, I did a research project in college about violence in video games, and found out that there is a correlation between violence and video games, but it has nothing to do with the subject matter. Rather, it’s to do with how much time a person spends playing them alone, instead of with friends. Ironically, by ripping hearts out together, these arcade kids were less likely to become violent than my roommate who threw the controller against the wall when he couldn’t beat the Super Nintendo version by himself.
Joshua Y Tsui’s Insert Coin, which recently screened at the Lake County Film Festival, doesn’t offer a ton of surprises to anyone who’s been clued in to video game culture for a while, but it does put everything together in entertaining fashion to tell the story of the Williams-Midway merger, and what it meant for arcade games thereafter. The Williams folks had already upped the sex ad violence ante with NARC, under cover of making a game with an anti-drugs message wherein gratuitous violence against drug ushers got a pass as being morally okay. Mortal Kombat was initially planned as a quick turnaround game that would feature Jean-Claude Van Damme, who backed out of allowing his likeness. Ironically, of course, Van Damme would go on to star in the game-based Street Fighter movie, and see himself digitized in the official film tie-in game.
What’s most notable to anyone who remembers the ’90s is that the Midway-Williams folks who speak on camera make it clear that nobody ever really worried about censorship. Everything was about pushing the envelope, with the movies RoboCop and The Running Man as key points of reference. So yes, there you have it, though they don’t explicitly say so: the character name “Sub-Zero” is a direct lift from the latter.
Something else I suspected is finally confirmed onscreen: most of these games were not designed to ever be beaten on one quarter. That may seem like a “duh” moment, but yes, in some cosmic sense, I always assumed the game played fair and it was just my poor abilities that led to me dropping $10 a turn. Even worse: Smash TV promised an Easter egg hidden room that didn’t actually exist, prompting so much backlash that the company had to send out a modification featuring a room full of miniature cartoon strippers.
Before arcades died altogether, Midway found their ultimate triumph in NBA Jam, which made the rules of basketball more gamer friendly while utilizing all the top basketball stars of the era. No digital blood was involved, but the programmers did find a way to add fire.
Nowadays, Mortal Kombat is a long-standing entertainment franchise, and things have even cycled back around to where RoboCop and Arnold Schwarzenegger are actually special guest characters in the game they helped inspire. You can’t, as the saying goes, “buy that for a dollar” any more. But Insert Coin offers a glowing look back to the time when you could at least buy one blood-splattered fight for a quarter.
