The Bizarre Way Your Character Could Die In Killer Instinct
Two-player fighting video games were once the highlight of long weekend nights for any kid who craved friendly competition without all the bangs and bruises of fist fighting their friends. Hopefully, that includes everyone. Killer Instinct was a healthy alternative to friendly scuffles. Plus, it was a lot of fun. It's not every night you get to pretend to be a werewolf beating up on an ice monster.
The franchise started in 1994 and was one of the first fighting games on the market. It was pretty diverse as far as character selection goes. You got to choose from a slew of human fighters with different backgrounds, or you could branch out and play as some sort of mutant, demon, cyborg, or monster. The game had several unique stages and, like Mortal Kombat, each character had fancy finishing moves similar to "fatalities" called "ultimate combos." And one of those combos was pretty darn bizarre, especially for a game played by kids.
Boobed to death
The original Killer Instinct game had this neat human female character named Orchid. Orchid wears a one-piece jumpsuit that accentuates her unnecessarily large "selling points." It's like they purposefully were marketing this game towards adolescent males who didn't mind seeing large "bazungas" in low resolution. The game says Orchid is a "secret agent" and that her abilities are "shrouded in secrecy," and by "secrecy" they must mean that skin-tight jumpsuit.
Orchid's bizarre "ultimate combo" is one of the weirdest ways to die in early fighting games. Once Orchid has her opponent on the ropes, she executes a "flash of death." You hear a zipping noise as she turns toward her opponent and gives her back to the screen, mostly because the game doesn't want to show blocky 90s animated nudity. You then see the front of her jumpsuit in her hands as she pulls it open. The opponent has some sort of boob-induced heart attack and falls to the ground defeated. There are a few problems with this of course, like the zipper sound. Why is there a zipper sound for a jumpsuit that clearly has no zipper? You'd think the "ultimate combo" would only work on human characters since monsters, skeletons, demons, and robots wouldn't have much interest in the mammaries of a human woman. Being that logically consistent would probably take all fun away from one of the only good things to come out of that decade.