This month I had a very serious article topic in mind, but everything in real life is so serious and difficult right now that I decided what was actually needed was something ridiculous. A friend of mine often goes to whatever is showing at the local discount cinema which has my favorite theatre amenity – ah, reclining seats! – and this week it’s Mortal Kombat II. They are a completionist in their approach to media, so naturally they watched the first movie and then ordered the Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection game, which very nerdily compiles a whole host of versions released by Midway from the arcade one I first played in 1993 through to 2003, including a lost 1997 limited arcade test release of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3: WaveNet Edition. They invited me to come play, and as a teaser sent me a gif of the “Kiss of Death” Fatality (finishing move) that Kitana delivers, where she kisses her opponent and they puff up like a balloon and explode in a burst of ichor. She’ll kiss anyone like that and my friend remembered it as giving queer vibes back in the day, which made me think about queer coding in video games (the subtext kind more than the programming kind, although sometimes the subtext is coded in) and also just all the hilariously stupid, queer as in strange special moves that game designers have come up with.  

There are plenty of very smart things written about how problematic the history of queer representation is in video games and how few games feature queer, trans, and nonbinary or gender nonconforming characters, which is a larger number than in the past but proportionally still a small or even smaller percentage of all games as the number of games overall has expanded exponentially. For instance, Video Games Have Always Been Queer (NYU Press, 2019) by Bo Ruberg explores queer ways of reading and designing games beyond explicit queer content and Cat’s Controller Corner “History of Queerness in Videogames” series on Substack walks through queer video game history by decade. There are also a number of games from this century that feature good queer representation, queer mods developed to play straight coded games in queer ways, and games developed by queer and gender diverse folks themselves. Queerness in games has evolved along with queer identities, from same-sex marriage in Fable (2004), to fully developed queer romance arcs in Dragon Age: Origins (2009), the charming queer coming-of-age story in Life is Strange (2015), a lovely asexual romance narrative in The Outer Worlds (2019),and the metaphorical trans journey of self-discovery in Celeste (2018) which developer Maddy Thorson has said helped her realize her own non-binary and trans identity. That’s all important and fantastic stuff, but what I am currently here for is queer shenanigans and stupid moves.

Queer coding in video game history has largely played out in the form of using queerness or gender nonconformity either for humor or to signal villainy or alien nature, which of course is problematic but also has the elliptical effect of speaking to the queer experience of being demonized and treated as an outsider and feeding the deep love so many queer folks have for villains, monsters, and aliens. Do I love villains and monsters because I would naturally love them or did I come to love them through my experience as a queer transguy and by having those be the queer characters that I saw growing up? The truth is that I don’t really care – I’m very happy being who I am and loving all the strange creatures – but the question is a bit of a haunted carousel.

And on that note, here is a small selection of the vast number of ridiculous, queer coded or just queer as in strange things I’ve encountered in video games.

Fatal Kisses and Friendship in Mortal Kombat

Kitana’s Kiss of Death in MKII (1993) and MK3 (1995) plays out like a massive allergic reaction, as if she’s wearing fast acting poisoned lipstick like some kind of femme assassin in a 1960s spy movie. Technically it’s just deadly but when she does it with one of the other female fighters it’s not *not* gay… Also in MKII, there is the Babality Fatality, where you turn your opponent into a baby, and the Friendship Fatality, where you do something like hug a teddy bear or pull a rabbit out of a hat and then FRIENDSHIP appears on the screen in giant rainbow balloon letters. Making friends by producing a rabbit from somewhere in your clothing is an unusual approach, but rabbits are pretty cute so it might work.

Soul Calibur Leather Daddy

The Soul Calibur games include a character called Voldo, who looks like a Freddy Krueger leather daddy with suggestive spider moves. His idle animation involves the most exaggerated, full body pelvic thrust you can imagine paired with an assortment of fetish gear and a Tom of Finland sized codpiece. Combined with his Mantis Crawl move, where he scuttles around face up on all fours like a horror movie contortionist in a full back arch, he pelvic thrusts his opponent into the air and bounces them repeatedly on his (sometimes spiky) codpiece. Not subtle at all.  

Resident Evil Tofu Survivor

In the original Resident Evil 2 (1998) you can unlock a speedrun as a block of tofu armed with knives and herbs. The 2019 remake expands that to include a Tofu Survivor minigame where you can play as different types of tofu that have different weapons and personalities, including a red Rambo-inspired Konjac tofu that comes with a bunch of flaming artillery and the green Uiro-Mochi sweet rice cake tofu that comes with nothing but grenades. They also deform as you take damage in a tofu-like way. They evolved out of the basic, block-shaped model the developers used to test whether attacks and collisions were working properly, which they nicknamed Tofu and then decided to include as an unlockable extra. Tofu is not queer, but it is inherently nonbinary.

Yakuza Chickens, Pigeons, and Crawfish

A bunch of the special moves in Yakuza: Like a Dragon (2020) really lean into the silly aspects of the franchise. For instance, Pigeon Raid which calls down a flock of angry pigeons or the ability to summon anything from a giant poisonous crawfish to a man dressed as a baby who stuns foes by screaming. And like Yakuza 0 (2015) where you can hire Nugget the chicken as a real estate manager for your properties, Like a Dragon has a business manager chicken called Omelette who you will represent you in shareholder meetings. All very much queer as in strange.  

HIMBO Sims

The Sims (2000) was groundbreaking because it made every Sim pansexual and left their relationship preferences entirely up to the player, but that was one of at least two instances of programmers coding queerness into a Sims game without the developers realizing it. For the 2000 Sims game, the developers had decided not to include queer relationships but the gay programmer, Patrick J. Barrett III, was given an outdated design document that did not include the update to straight coding. This came as a surprise to the development team when two of the female Sims kissed during a demo at the 1999 E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) but game designer Will Wright decided to keep it that way. The other instance was the 1996 flight simulator game, SimCopter, where Jacques Servin, a programmer sick of the aggressively heterosexual way his editor was being used to create “bimbos” (sexy NPC ladies who pop up and celebrate mission completion) thought “why not studs?” and programmed in a bunch of beefcake boys in speedos. The game had sold over 50,000 copies before the developers realized the himbos were there, and only then because his random number generator didn’t work as planned and spawned more of them than expected in the final level, where he said there were “muscle studs kissing everything in sight, especially one another.” He was fired for “insertion of unauthorized content” and the boys were removed, but at least some players got a side of beefcake with their copters.

I’m sure I’ve missed many opportunities in this list, so feel free to add your contributions in the comments and express your (kind and playful) outrage at my impudence in daring to leave your favorites out.

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Alex MacFadyen thinks The Friendship Fatality could be the next best-selling band.