On August 30th, 2003, DreemerNJ and I released the first official, full length DarkTemplarz.com UMK3 combo video, which was very well received by the FGC at a time where most players were only playing older Street Fighter, King of Fighters, Marvel vs Capcom 2, Capcom vs SNK 2 etc. Videos by players back in the day such as NKI and Sicdic inspired us to go beyond short teaser clips and eventually into full length music videos.
You can see ded_’s remastered version of the video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp6Xc7hgCgc
Around the same time, South American players were releasing combo clips for UMK3 as well and this turned into a collaborative effort down the road with Ninja Grinder to promote UMK3 and N64 MKT with full length combo videos and NG would also collaborate with players like RZP and Mgo. This spawned a series of videos that promoted MK and increased interest in running MK games at tournaments, particularly in the north eastern US and and spreading through various countries in South America like Venezuela, Colombia and Chile. As time went on, the combos became more advanced, less practical and completely exhibition level but this only increased the demand for more videos.
This eventually developed into Mortal Kombat centric websites called UltimateMK.com and www.mkkompetitive.com.ve. Today marks the 10 year anniversary of the turning point for the revival of the scene. There were a couple years of build up to that point, and a lot of fighting resistance from the previous incarnation of scene along the way but we made it through, and today the MK scene now spans multiple games and franchises, being played all over the world, in a respected manner while no longer being the red headed step child of the FGC.
During the formative years, DarkTemplarz/UltimateMK joined forces with combo and video making machines like ded_ , Selpex and Frozen Worm. The videos got better, more vicious and more elaborate. The advent of youtube helped reach a larger audience, but even in the days of serve only word of mouth information, these videos would achieve upwards of 10,000 hits a month in what was still not quite a bandwidth hungry internet. DarkTemplarz.com was at one point in the top 10% of websites on the internet for bandwidth usage due to the popularity of combo videos. So much so, that our host had to respectfully ask us to find another one because they couldn’t keep up.
Today, things like KombatNetwork, TestYourMight and others exist in part because of the effort put into these videos. Content would spread to match videos, strategy guides, tournament videos, interviews, streams and much more. Without content, it’s very difficult to draw an outside audience and display to players what can be done with what were old games even at the time, and was very important to jump starting the scene.
Here is a playlist, courtesy of ded_, of many of the videos worked on by DarkTemplarz/UltimateMK which would eventually evolve into KombatNetwork
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcpLFKIdj56vFQ41FJ_q1zeIV0UIsl89d