Steven Lefcourt Explores The More Violent Side To NES With: 8-Bit Fatalities

8-Bit Fatalities is artist Steve Lefcourt’s new project that grew from growing up at an arcade and his love affair with Mortal Kombat.

Here’s what he had to say about his epic gallery set:

Before Mortal Kombat, violence in video games was largely unheard of or ignored because of its extreme pixelized simplicity. But when Liu Kang and Sub Zero came along to finish off arcade goers the world changed and parents were in an uproar (not mine though).

I couldn’t understand what the big deal was though, because as a videogame player all my life I had already considered my actions life and death. Just because you didn’t see pac-man violently tearing into the ghosts with his jaws, or mario smashing in the brains of a goomba, thats what I knew was happening. I knew my goal was to kill these enemies, so Mortal Kombat wasn’t a big change for me. To me, it was still just a game, where fake deaths happened as part of game progression. To uninformed adults, however, Mortal Kombat was a photo realistic depiction of kids becoming complicit in virtual murders. And so, I decided to show everyone just what I imagined was happening when these little blocky, pixelized abstractions did when they came into contact with eachother, but in a much more visceral, and gory way than could ever be shown with limited graphical systems.

Today, we get to see what happens when an over zealous blue ghost tries to bite off more than he can chew. A powered up pac-man was not staying inside his ectoplasmic stomach for long.