The original Killer Instinct arrived in arcades in late 1994: a period that wasn’t exactly suffering from a lack of fighting games. But even with heavyweights like Super Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat II tearing it up, Killer Instinct carved out a niche for itself as one of the best-looking and most exciting games of its kind.
With the long-awaited Season 3 of Killer Instinct arriving on PC and Xbox One today—bringing a truckload of new content to the game’s already brilliant reboot—we thought the time was right to look back at everything that made us fall in love with this fantastic (albeit sporadic) series.
So without further ado…
1. The combos
Even the most hardened Killer Instinct fan would struggle to deny the series was created as a way to cash in on the enormous popularity of fighting games like Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat. It was clearly a mash-up of elements from both franchises. But unlike other fighting games which were happy to essentially re-skin one of those two titles, Killer Instinct offered some fundamental changes to the existing fight game formula. The big one: combos.
In Killer Instinct, combos were as essential to fights as fireball projectiles were to Street Fighter or arterial sprays of blood were to Mortal Kombat. Characters could string together massive series of moves, resulting in a plethora of rapid-fire hits on hapless opponents. Arcade units even kept track of the highest combos for individual characters, meaning that the quest to pull off ever more impressive Super Combos, Hyper Combos, Monster Combos and the like became a reason to play the game in and of itself.
The most impressive combo was the infamous Ultra Combo, which served as Killer Instinct’s answer to the Mortal Kombat fatality. Whether you loved or loathed Instinct depended almost entirely on whether you were on the performing or receiving end of these combos. Which brings us to…
2. C-C-C-Combo Breakers
Combo Breakers were where Killer Instinct got really inventive. Like a counter move in a wrestling game, these were moves a defending player could employ to break an incoming combo attack. Like Mortal Kombat’s memorable audio sample “Toasty!”, a perfectly-timed Combo Breaker would be met by a gravelly-voiced narrator yelling the phrase, “C-C-C-Combo Breaker!”
Combo Breakers were a genius addition to Killer Instinct because they added a level of strategy to the game that let a player seize control at any moment. 2013’s series reboot added even more depth by introducing us to Counter Breakers which—you guessed it!—C-C-C-Combo Breaker’d a Combo Breaker. Counter Breakers can, themselves, be countered, thereby transforming every Killer Instinct game between skilled players into an ultra-violent chess match.
Fantastically, the current Killer Instinct reboot even gives you a terrific Practice mode that lets you dissect your fights at half-speed, analyze frame data, hitbox displays and similar other tools, meaning that you can take your journey to become the ultimate Killer Instinct combo master to insanely-detailed levels.
3. The Double Energy Bar
By the time Killer Instinct came along in the ‘90s, the format of fighting games was pretty much set in stone: two players fighting to deplete the energy bar of the other in a best-of-three rounds confrontation. Killer Instinct didn’t stray too far from this proven concept, but did add the intriguing double energy bar conceit. In short, rather than having to beat your opponent in two rounds with a reset in between, in Killer Instinct every character has two bars of energy. The goal is to diminish both of your enemy’s bars to zero. While the game does momentarily pause when a player’s bar is depleted, the whole fight takes place in one round—which means that the winning player doesn’t have their health magically restored to 100 percent after knocking out an opponent for the first time.
It may not sound a revolutionary alteration, but it all adds up to the sense that Killer Instinct was a more strategic fighter than some of its less complex rivals.
4. The Graphics
Killer Instinct was simply the most stunning arcade around in the heady days of 1994. There was good reason for this: it was the first arcade game to boast an internal hard disk drive, meaning that data didn’t have to simply be confined to the game’s ROMs. For non-geeks, what this equated to was smooth, fast-paced action and a host of other technical improvements, akin to comparing a Playstation 2 to current-gen console graphics.
Alongside gorgeously-crafted character sprites, Killer Instinct’s backgrounds were among the most detailed of their kind—being pre-rendered as movies, which responded to wherever a player was standing at a particular time. While Killer Instinct was strictly a 2D fighting game in its mechanics, it also incorporated 3D effects such as stages which would perform a full revolution when certain moves were performed. The console ports of the game lacked the jaw-dropping graphics of the arcade, and the current Killer Instinct reboot may not look significantly flashier than other fighters out there, but Instinct’s graphics remain one of its lasting legacies.
5. The Characters
Let’s be honest: outside of a select few, a lot of the characters populating fighting games from the first half of the 1990s weren’t exactly a unique bunch. In fact, this was even the basis of a lawsuit when Capcom U.S.A. sued Japanese developer Data East over its obvious Street Fighter ripoff Fighter’s History. Data East won the case, arguing in court that its characters basically represented generic archetypes. In part aided by its impressive graphics, Killer Instinct’s roster made a strong impression, though. From a hybrid velociraptor to an ice creator to a cyborg to a sword-brandishing skeleton straight out of Jason and the Argonauts, this was one of the most varied and memorable casts of characters ever to beat the living hell out of each other.
For the record, Sabrewulf remains my all-time favorite Killer Instinct combatant.
6. Humiliation Moves
Multiplayer gaming has changed a lot in the past few decades, but one thing that’s never changed is the sense of joy felt as you humble an opponent who, just minutes earlier, was bragging about their impending victory. Killer Instinct tapped into the perfectly with its so-called Humiliation moves: a ridiculous match ender that has the loser performing a goofy dance on screen.
To pull off a Humiliation you’ll need to defeat an opponent without losing your first life bar, and then enter a code when the screen turns red and says “danger.” Mortal Kombat II had actually introduced similar Friendship moves one year earlier, as a not-so-subtle dig at critics of the series’ ultra-violent approach, but for my money Humiliations were always much, much funnier.
And it doesn’t hurt that the disco music which accompanies it is pretty much the definition of an earworm. Which, finally, leads us to…
7. The Killer Soundtrack
We’ve mentioned the classic shout-outs of phrases like “Triple Combo” and “C-C-C-Combo Breaker!” already, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Killer Instinct’s sweet sound design. Compared to some of its more generic rivals, Instinct featured a classic soundtrack full of major earworms, composed by Rare regulars Robin Beanland and Graeme Norgate, who would go on to write the soundtracks for games like Blast Corps and GoldenEye 007. The resulting Killer Instinct soundtrack was so catchy that it actually came packaged as the “Killer Cuts” CD with the game’s SNES port.
Fortunately, the tradition of great Killer Instinct soundtracks continues to the present day reboot. SeamlessR’s remix of “The Way U Move,” created for the Season One soundtrack, remains an undisputed highlight.
Luke Dormehl has written for Fast Company, Wired, Empire, Politico, SFX, The Guardian, and more. He is the author of The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems… And Create More, published by Perigee.