Mortal Kombat X is the latest installment in the Mortal Kombat video game franchise and it comes with its very own pro tournaments.

The Mortal Kombat ESL Pro League allows Xbox one players in Europe and North America to battle it out in weekly challenges with 16 finalists competing in the Grand Finals in Los Angeles on July 11. The Mortal Kombat Cup tournament is open to players in 17 countries and will hold the finals in Paris on July 5th at the Japan Expo convention. The winners are in for more than just the satisfaction of victory with the total prize winnings coming in at $100,000. Featuring 30 “kombatants” to choose from it’s sure to be a blood bath.

Midway Games was the first to push the boundaries of “fighting games,” taking them to a whole new level with the very first Mortal Kombat in 1992. The Mortal Kombat development team ushered in a new era by moving arcade fighting enthusiasts from the frenzied simplistic button mash experience of the day to complex strategically timed button combinations that needed to be memorized for each and every character in the game. Acquiring the knowledge to perform these brutally elegant finishing moves became a badge of honor for gamers among their peer group. The game was considered so violent that by 1994 the Entertainment Software Rating Board was created, establishing a rating system to warn parents of the violent nature of a game before they purchased it for their children. So of course, at that time, it was the game with the longest line in front of it at the arcade.

It might be surprising to some that the original Mortal Kombat, a game which revolutionized the fighting video game genre, was made by a team of 4 people in only 10 months. The team consisted of programmer Ed Boon, John Tobias and John Vogel on graphics and Dan ‘Toasty’ Forden on sound. The team was originally tasked with producing a game adaptation of Universal Soldier with Jean Claude Van Damme and had completed a lot of work on the game before the deal fell through. The concept was to feature the actor’s likeness in the video game characters using digital images of the actors. Boon and Tobias decided to continue building out the game and reworked the game’s story. If you ever wondered why Johnny Cage reminded you of Van Damme now you know that it’s because he’s a throwback to the game’s initial concept.

Taking the fight to the streets, cosplayers and kombatants in their own right step it up as they capture the essence of their favorite Mortal Kombat characters. Check out this gallery of cosplay warriors as they show off their skills and battle to win the cosplay tournament ultimate prize.