When games like Street Fighter were still showing less violence than a professional boxing match, Mortal Kombat had decapitations, burnt corpses, and ripped out hearts — still beating, of course. The series’ violence was both its greatest controversy and its biggest selling point, but in the modern, more-mature video game industry, violence alone is not enough to sell a game.

That is why Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, Inc., looking to beef up its marketing campaign for Mortal Kombat X, turned to Bottlenose, a data analytics company that measures social trends in real time. Bottlenose used its platform to scour social data for ways that Mortal Kombat could connect with consumers outside of pure shock value.

“The millennial fanbase has always been there. It’s never wavered,” Adam Blumenfeld, director of Client Digital Strategies for Bottlenose, told me. “The problem was the entire game is predicated on violence, with Brutalities, Fatalities, etc.”

He added, “We had to look for alternative ways to connect with the consumer. This was really an exercise in data psychology.”

Violence is out, nostalgia and humor are in

Blumenfeld explained that the series’ fanbase is no longer impressed by violence alone, so Bottlenose used its “trend intelligence application,” Nerve Center, to search for the less obvious threads that tie fans to the Mortal Kombat franchise. As it turns out, nostalgia and humor are the real sellers for the series.

Some of the trends caught in Bottlenose’s net were a series of nostalgia-related hashtags where people frequently referenced Mortal Kombat as a formative experience of their 1990s childhood.

Users repeatedly brought up the games under Twitter hashtags like #memories, #childhood and #90sbaby, showing a clear trend that linked the series’ earlier titles to fond childhood memories. The influence of nostalgia is so strong that some people even remember the 1995 Mortal Kombat film as being a good movie.

I guess Goro did look pretty sweet

Bottlenose also caught a strong reaction to humor involving Mortal Kombat thanks to meme-ified phrases like “Finish Him” or “Flawless Victory,” as well as numerous fan videos, artwork and other media across the web that reference the games in humorous ways.

While nostalgia and humor were the broad trends found by Bottlenose, Blumenfeld noted that they couldn’t use one blanket approach across the entire social landscape. What works on Twitter might not work on Tumblr or Instagram, and vice versa.

“Even though this audience is one age group, they’re all over the place, and those behaviors differ from platform to platform,” Blumenfeld explained. As an example, he said, “Tumblr is rooted in observational humor, so we can focus on that for humor campaigns.”

Armed with this knowledge, Warner Bros. Interactive was able to focus its campaign on aspects of the Mortal Kombat series that called on fans’ positive feelings toward the series rather than their bloodlust.

Image credit: “Mortal Kombat Logo” Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.