Nitin Bhutani was bored. It was the fall of 1992 and he hung out with friends between classes where he attended college in Long Island, New York. The group had two hours to kill. Bhutani suggested we go to the student center and play some pinball and arcade games there. He had brown skin and dark, swept back hair and was looking for an excuse to get out of class and play games. But frankly, he was lukewarm to his own suggestion. He and his boys had played the recreation center’s handful of coin-operated amusements to death. But it was either pushing the buttons or pushing the books, so they sauntered over to the rec center.
To Bhutani’s surprise, a new cabinet stood among the games he had conquered. He looked at the pull-on mode. As the title of the game flashed across the screen, something caught his eye – the deliberate misspelling, the gold letters against a red background. A few other boys got up to play. One of them ended the match by firing a bolt of lightning at the other character which shot his head apart in a jet of blood. holy shit, he thought. “It just showed up one day. I see this game where people cut their heads off and think, ‘Oh my gosh, I have to play this,'” he recalls.
Bhutani no longer had to look for distractions between classes. In fact, the lessons had become the distraction. He was playing five to six hours a day Mortal Kombat, bouncing between the recreation center cabinet and his local arcade. It got tiring to compete against computer-controlled opponents. He needed challengers who would force him to get even better. “I try to tell people that when you were young and went to an arcade it was always one on one,” he says.
His friends liked the game and played against him. But soon Bhutani surpassed them. They wasted their money and he wasted his time fighting guys who weren’t pushing him to grow as a player.
Then the rumors started. “When you play in certain arcades, you hear, ‘Hey, there are some guys in so-and-so arcade who are good.’ You drive there and see what’s going on,” explains Bhutani.
Taking into account driving time and petrol in his Mortal Kombat schedule, Bhutani made a habit of getting into his car with friends and looking for competitors. Usually he defeated them, and one of three outcomes would occur: they would mount a storm and stomp out of the arcade, try to fight him, or show him reverence and ask to run with his crew. Whatever the case, Bhutani planted his flag in the ground of every playroom he captured. As he expanded his territory, he kept an ear open for rumors of better players. Then he would travel to their territory and defeat them as well. “That’s the way it was then,” he says of how he became aware of fresh meat through word of mouth. “There are no computers, nothing like that. There are beepers. What the hell are you going to do? Anyone beeping?’
One day Bhutani learned while playing a guy MK addict that one of the best players in the scene took on all the newcomers in an arcade in Westbury. Bhutani grinned. He had heard that before. The other player was adamant: This was not a sign. This man was one of the developers who made the game and he was unstoppable. Divine.
“The man who made the game?” Bhutani remembers saying that. ‘Okay. Let’s go get a piece of him.’
