Are you saying that you intuitively learned within such a short time of playing that e.g. pressing “←, →, ↓, В” or “→, →, ↑, ↑, Z” during the brief “Finish him!” makes Reptile perform a fatality? I find it hard to see the intuition here.
The creators talk about this in the companion podcast - the idea was that literature/media from these games still exists (which we can see as Ellie has the poster), and the only way you found out about fatalities anyway was via gaming publications/urban legends. Just like in the real world, nobody really learned these combos by trial and error.
> Everyone I ever met ever, learned such gaming combos, with their friends, by trial and error.
To be fair, fatalities are not generally discoverable by trial and error, unlike combos. You have such a small window of time to enter them when they show up at the end of the match. The first time I encountered one, I had no idea what was going on and then a few seconds later it was over.
However, back then we had gaming magazines and books that revealed all the fatalities, so you could easily look them up.
Thanks for that memory. Someone at school would whisper a combo move and you'd pencil it down and eagerly rush home from the bus later that day to try it out.
We really were guessing different combos, in rural Iowa at least.