Ba Ha Dugginich

This story may have been told on my original Blogger blog, but I’m not sure. It’s just been prominent in my head for some reason in the past few days, so I’m gonna re-tell it for the millionth time.

I was huge into Mortal Kombat II when it was in the arcades. I used to go constantly to the mall and to Burt’s Sportsplex in middlegare to play it. The difficulty dip settings on the machines in the mall were set much lower than at Burt’s, so, if there were very few people playing at the mall, I could easily get to Kintaro.

There were some other regulars too. There was BEV Lowes, a heavy set guy who worked at the movie theater; we called him “BEV Lowes” because BEV was what he put into the MKII machine when he got a high score and because he worked at Lowes Theater. There was a skater kid; we didn’t know his name. There was this Asian guy who looked like a girl and played with his hands crossed. This guy was ridiculous, he always played as Shang Tsung, and when he did fatalities, he always morphed into Sub Zero, deep froze his opponent until he morphed back into Shang, morphed into someone else, and did their fatality. Pretty much the worst insult to injury ever.

One day, I was in the arcade playing in 1 player mode, and I was really far. This little kid came by and played me in 2 player. While I was winning, the Asian dude came over and put his quarter on the screen, the signal that he was gonna fight the winner. When I finished the little kid, the Asian dude entered the game. We traded rounds. In the third round, I played a great deal of defense so that I could win. All of a sudden, I feel someone tapping me on the shoulder. I turn around and this kid, who I will refer to as “Ba Ha Dugginich,” asks me, “when’s it coming out?” I ended up losing because of the distraction.

Ok, some more backstory before I finish: this kid was a kid I went to school with, he didn’t have any friends, and my only communication with him was talking about Mortal Kombat I on Super Nintendo one day in school.

Back to the story. After losing to Asian guy, I tucked my head between my legs and attended to the stupid question. My only interpretation to his question is that he wanted me to tell him when Mortal Kombat II was coming out on Super Nintendo. Ok, I was a 14 year old adolescent and this was before the internet. MKII had just come out in the Arcade maybe a month or two before. How was I supossed to know when they were porting this game over to SNES?

So maybe you guys know: when’s it coming out?