How Mortal Kombat Made the Jump to Super NES and Sega Genesis
Discover how Mortal Kombat made the jump from arcades to 16-bit platforms, and the part it played in the console war between Sega and Nintendo.
[Author’s Note: My latest book, Long Live Mortal Kombat, is funding for the next day on Kickstarter, and takes a deep dive into the arcade era of the MK franchise. This excerpt comes from Arcade Perfect, a book I wrote in 2019 that delves into how arcade games were ported to home systems.]
JEFF PETERS KNEW he liked video games. He also knew, on a theoretical level, that someone, somewhere, made the programs stored in the diskettes he bought from his local electronics shop. He just had no idea who could do such a thing, much less how they would go about doing it. One of his friends demystified the process.
“One of my best friends at the time made a computer game and would sell it in Ziploc baggies, with the disk and instruction card, from the back of his truck to computer stores and individuals,” Peters said.
Fascinated, Peters investigated the Radio Shack TRS-80 personal computer — somewhat affectionately referred to as the “Trash-80” — at his high school. He enrolled in the few programming courses on the curriculum and kept at it after graduation, moving on to PDP-11 minicomputers hooked up to mainframes in college. But programming was just a way to scratch an itch. He had no designs on making games professionally. How could he? That wasn’t a real job. “I was going to be a lawyer. I was a speech-and-debate guy, and I was looking at law schools. I was going to go into corporate law because it intrigued me, for some weird reason I still don’t understand. Then this video game phenomenon hit, and like everybody else, I went to arcades.”
“Mortal Kombat hit a very specific time in the industry where a bunch of things happening in the background affected development of this game in particular.” -Jeff Peters
Arcade games enthralled him. Characters like Donkey Kong and Pac-Man were far more captivating than the spreadsheets and word processors he was using in school. With a few quarters, nimble fingers, and an eye for patterns, he could conquer their challenges. Peters got better with every quarter he dropped into machines, reaching later stages and demolishing high scores. He was the king of his arcade.
Twin Galaxies, an online repository of world records in video games, opened Peters’ eyes that there were dozens, even hundreds of others like him. He kept playing, kept improving and, along with a few others including Twin Galaxies chief Walter Day, got his shot at worldwide fame when he became part of the U.S. National Video Game Team.
The National Video Game Team dated back to March 1983, when promoter Jim Riley pitched Walter Day on his interest in assembling a team of competitive gamers to travel the world and pit their reflexes and thumbs against all challengers. Day, who had grown in acclaim as Twin Galaxies’ reputation exploded in parallel with that of arcades, agreed. He nominated Steve Sanders, then the world’s most renowned Donkey Kong player, as team captain. Under Sanders, Day and Riley assembled a who’s-who of the world’s high-scorers, among them Eric Ginner, a multiple world-record holder who went on to co-develop Ms. Pac-Man for the Atari Lynx; and Billy Mitchell, a pinball nut who set his sights on Donkey Kong and Pac-Man, and who achieved global fame when he co-starred in the King of Kong documentary against baby-face science teacher and aspiring Donkey Kong pro Steve Wiebe. (Mitchell was later stripped of his world records after it was discovered that he’d set many of his high scores using the MAME arcade emulator program instead of authentic coin-op hardware.)
Formed as the Electronic Circus, Day and Riley promoted their players as superstars but got off to a shaky start, crumbling just five days after launch. The Electronic Circus was no more, but the players continued as the U.S. National Video Game Team. New recruits such as Jeff Peters filled out the ranks. “We used to set up worldwide competitions, and we’d travel the world to take on other countries’ videogame teams,” Peters said. “We took over Twin Galaxies’ international scoreboard and got scores in the Guinness Book of World Records. That was my start of making money in the videogame business.”
The team did more than compete. Observing a gap in the magazine market left by the folding of rags such as Joystick, Peters and Steve Harris founded Electronic Gaming Monthly as the official magazine of the U.S. National Video Game Team in 1988. At the start, they knew nothing about putting out a magazine. “We brought in all of our game-playing friends, mostly arcade and console players, and it was created from a labor of love,” Peters explained. “EGM came not from a corporate point of view of, ‘Hey, here’s an industry, here’s a theme, let’s go create a rag,’ but from fans of, ‘This is the thing we want to read, so let’s write what we want to read.”
EGM took off, and Peters sought his next challenge in the gaming industry: Development. “That was really my passion: I wanted to go make the stuff.” He was hired at Sculptured Software, a small studio founded in Salt Lake City, Utah, by Bryan Brandenburg, George Metos, and Peter Adams in 1984. Sculptured’s specialty was porting games from one platform to another. The scrappy team gained a reputation for their conversions of coin-op titles.
“The games we were doing were reaching the top of the charts,” said Peters, who was project director at Sculptured Software from May 1992 until September 1997. “We were known as the Mode 7 studio and were quickly gaining a reputation for being able to get the most out of the hardware.”
Mode 7 was one of several graphics modes for Super NES. With it, developers could stretch and rotate backgrounds to create pseudo-3D effects. Sculptured Software put the mode to good use in games such as the Super Star Wars trilogy, a run-and-gun series where players flew through the Death Star’s trench and blasted through ranks of Storm Troopers. One of the studio’s most well-known titles was 1992’s NCAA Basketball. Unlike competing hoops titles of the day such as Electronic Arts’ NBA Live, which displayed on-court action from an overhead, isometric view, NCAA Basketball harnessed Mode 7 to render 3D-like graphics and gameplay: A behind-the-shoulder camera followed players, and the view rotated as they moved, setting the mold for how basketball games would look and play on future hardware such as Sony’s PlayStation.
“Most of my SNES friends fell into the Street Fighter II camp because they got such a good version of that game. MK felt like a win for the other guys.” -Dan “Elektro” Amrich
Other developers took notice of Sculptured’s sales and critical acclaim, leading the studio to build and sell development kits to companies. Developers took advantage, largely because they had little choice. Nintendo wasn’t in the habit of loaning or selling kits for its 8- and 16-bit consoles. Most studios were given a manual that explained the Super Nintendo’s approval process for licensed software and how the console’s architecture worked, and were left to assemble kits on their own. “Our tools were sold, assemblers and compilers in a physical box that allowed access,” Peters said. “They became the industry standard for a while. If you were going to do NES or Super Nintendo development, you bought a hardware kit and the tools to do it from us. That implied we knew more about the hardware than anyone else. We were selling development kits for it.”
Creating and selling middleware — an interface for software or hardware authored by someone other than the platform’s manufacturer — was just a side gig for Sculptured. Its primary source of income was taking on contract work. In early 1993, Acclaim came to Sculptured with an offer: Port Mortal Kombat, a new one-on-one fighting game from Williams and Midway, to the Super Nintendo.
“They had a licensing deal with Midway, and brought the project to us,” Peters remembered. They said, ‘Are you guys interested?’ At first, we weren’t.”
ENGINEERS FROM Midway pulled their truck up to an arcade, threw open the shutter door, and rolled out a plain black cabinet. They wheeled it into the cool, dimly lit den of flashing screens and plugged it in near two of Capcom’s Street Fighter II machines. Then they waited.
“It was like stepping into a ring against Mike Tyson at his prime. But, we flipped the switch and sat back and watched,” said John Tobias, co-creator of Mortal Kombat.
At first, the cabinet just sat there. Then the attract mode ran. Grainy clips of digitized actors running through sequences of martial arts moves played out. The screen faded, and two characters squared off atop a narrow stone bridge set against a cloudy night sky. They moved toward one another, throwing kicks and punches — and then one crouched down and swung a right hook that connected under his opponent’s chin, launching him into the air and splattering blood all over the walkway.
One of the players at the back of the line to play Street Fighter II stepped out of place, walked over to the black cabinet, and dropped in a quarter. A few seconds later, someone else wandered over. Two more joined them. Three more. By the end of that weekend, the Street Fighter II cabinets had been abandoned. “That’s when we knew MK had the potential to become a phenomenon of its own,” Tobias said.
On the surface, Mortal Kombat was one in a growing line of Street Fighter II clones. All were gunning for Capcom, the king of the one-on-one fighter. No one had even come close. “I was a Street Fighter II fanatic. I was competitive,” said Sculptured Software’s Jeff Peters. “I would go to tournaments at local arcades, and it was, all right, how long can you hold the machine and take on all comers? It started the whole fighting-game frenzy: Everybody was knocking off Street Fighter II.”
“I came up with DULLARD. The ABACABB code was forced upon me: I was instructed to put in a code word that only used A, B, and C.” -Paul Carruthers
None of the knockoffs seemed able to capture SFII’s perfect storm of vibrant graphics, unique characters, and fast gameplay. Until Mortal Kombat. “From the game’s inception we knew it would not be a clone,” Tobias said. “If we looked at Street Fighter, it was to study how not to do something in Mortal Kombat. I remember we just sort of conceded to the raw look of digitized footage. I think that was the right choice because it went a long way in making sure that our game would stand out visually from Street Fighter II.”
MK’s most notable difference was its aesthetic. Where SFII looked like a cartoon, MK looked like an R-rated film. Its environments were grungy and dark. Its characters were lifelike thanks to a motion capture process that involved recording real actors performing all the moves. “I also think that the time we spent developing the characters and story, which was an odd thing to do in an arcade product, helped build a larger world in the minds of our players,” said Tobias. “That impact lives with MK even in its most recent iterations. Of course, our brand of violence gave us a seat at pop culture’s table.”
And Mortal Kombat had blood. The red stuff sprayed and splattered when players punched, kicked, and knocked each other into the air. But it was most abundant at the end of the match, when victorious fighters were given a short window of opportunity to perform a Fatality on their dizzied opponent. If the move was entered correctly, the screen darkened, and the blood flowed: the blue-clad ninja Sub-Zero tore off his opponent’s head with the spinal cord attached; movie star Johnny Cage, a nod to Jean-Claude Van Damme from when MK’s original design starred the popular martial-artist-turned-actor, punched his victim’s head clean off; and Kano, a master criminal with a metal plate covering half his face, ripped his opponent’s still-beating heart from their chest.
Most impressively, Mortal Kombat had been made by a team of four, led by programmer Ed Boon and artist John Tobias. In April 1992, they declared their dry run at a local arcade where Street Fighter II held sway a resounding success. The game was incomplete; Sonya Blade, MK’s sole female character, had yet to be added. Still, that Mortal Kombat’s test version had pulled players away from SFII told Boon and Tobias that their David could hold his own against Capcom’s Goliath. “We never knew for certain how successful the game would be. We only knew that we poured our hearts into it and that it was fun to play,” said Tobias.
Street Fighter II had gained notoriety within competitive circles, but Mortal Kombat took a different tack. Its mechanics were solid, yet accessible. Former GamePro editor Dan “Elektro” Amrich recalled a friend complaining MK was too easy because he could beat the computer-controlled opponents by performing jump kicks over and over. “And sure enough, I tried it — with Scorpion — and it was pretty effective,” Amrich recalled. “So I always saw MK as more accessible and you could get lucky here and there, whereas if you studied SF, you could easily take any casual player. But MK’s real secret weapon was its willingness to push boundaries, to offer those fatalities and have players doubt that they even existed because who would do that? Are they even allowed?”
Mortal Kombat’s fatalities were so graphic that they had to literally be seen to be believed. One kid would hold court on a playground and strive to convince a jury of peers he’d seen one character rip off his face and breathe fire, reducing the other guy to ashes and bones. Another kid swore up and down that a fighter in a white jumpsuit and straw hat could zap characters’ heads off with a bolt of lightning. “That breeds interest and foot traffic,” Amrich said of the rumors surrounding MK’s gory finishing moves, “and before you know it, you have people looking closer because that controversial thrill was so unexpected. And that’s going to be powerful with kids whose media is largely — and rightfully! — gate-kept by their parents. Here’s a game you’re know you’re ‘not supposed to play,’ even if you haven’t been strictly forbidden to play it. It tapped into the lure of the forbidden.”
At first, Jeff Peters didn’t know what to make of Acclaim’s offer to contract Sculptured for a Super NES version of Mortal Kombat. Midway’s bloody brawler seemed like just another SFII imitator. Below the surface, he saw something special. “Finishing Moves were different and funny, so that was another attraction point. And as a fighting game, it worked.”
“While MK was born in a way that was completely organic, literally a black box with a game in it that drew hordes of players, Acclaim recognized its viral nature.” -John Tobias
Putting his pro skills to work, Peters played the game and wrote up a detailed analysis of what MK had going for it, and what he saw as the biggest hurdles standing in the way of a successful port.
Pros: It wasn’t a shameless Street Fighter II copycat; it had a unique art style that would resonate with older players put off by Capcom’s cartoonish visuals; and the violence was so over-the-top, so absurd, it was humorous and charming. There was no harm in fatalities and uppercuts, Peters concluded, because no one could take them seriously.
Cons: The game’s art style, hundreds of frames of animation, detailed backgrounds, and flashy special attacks, would be a bear to port. Nintendo’s 16-bit hardware was robust, but paled compared to Midway’s coin-op innards.
Acclaim’s managers took Peters’ evaluation seriously. Acclaim was a marketing company, more versed in how to sell a product than how to build it. If Sculptured Software believed Mortal Kombat had a chance of dethroning Street Fighter II, they could throw a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign behind it. “My first analysis was that it would not reach the same level of Street Fighter II because of how different it was, the audience Street Fighter II had already built, the number of units it sold, all that stuff,” Peters said.
However, he continued, Mortal Kombat didn’t have to be the next SFII. It had more than enough pizazz to be as big a hit on home systems as it had proven to be in arcades. “I believed it could be a contender. It could stand on its own and have enough of a following that it could probably rise above all the knockoffs. That was the original analysis of, it’s had the chance to rise above all the knockoffs, but it probably won’t be the next Street Fighter II.”
It was settled. Acclaim hired Sculptured to do the SNES port, while Probe, a studio based across the pond, would handle a Sega Genesis conversion. Farming out the same port to multiple studios was an unorthodox move, but one Peters understood.
“By separating the two SKUs, Acclaim was hedging their bets. They were compartmentalizing the work that each developer would do. So, although it cost Acclaim slightly more money to have two different developers making two versions of the same game independently, it at least allowed for more focus. I think that helped get the project done within their time frame, because there definitely wasn’t much time.”
JEFF PETERS MANAGED the team charged with bringing Mortal Kombat to Nintendo’s lead platform. He and a handful of developers had approximately six months to turn around their version. That would give Acclaim time to coordinate advertising centered on a specific release date: September 13, 1993, dubbed “Mortal Monday” by the marketing gurus. Almost right away, they hit a snag.
Sculptured Software’s usual process for assigning teams to a project was for managers like Peters to hold planning sessions ahead of time to determine what resources — programmers and artists — were about to wrap up on a game and would be free to kick off the next. Before Peters could assess who was available and who wasn’t, studio owner George Metos stepped in. “We get to that phase with Mortal Kombat, and George goes, ‘Wait, I have this programmer who will do the work,’ and he brings us Gary,” Peters remembered.
Gary Lindquist materialized as if from thin air. No one knew anything about him: Where he was from, what his qualifications were. But Lindquist assured Peters he was more than capable of spinning off Mortal Kombat’s SNES conversion with time to spare, so Peters assembled a small team of artists around Lindquist and worked with his crew to establish goals. (Gary Lindquist could not be reached for comment.)
Every conversion was a numbers game: An arcade board’s specs pitted against a home platform’s meager resources. Mortal Kombat ran on a Texas Instruments system board that incorporated a 32-bit CPU with dedicated graphics and sound processors. Predictably, the Super NES chugged along in comparison. On the plus side, its palette gave artists 32,768 unique colors to work with, 256 which could be displayed on the screen at one time.
“The fear of somebody on our team accidentally or intentionally putting in a code that turned blood on or bringing in original fatalities in the Super Nintendo verison— that was real.” -Jeff Peters
“We were literally trying to shove this into a tiny box that this game was not designed to run on,” said Peters. “But our goal remained the same: How close to the original can we make this? Every decision we undertook was about trying to achieve that goal and make a perfect arcade port.”
Mortal Kombat was promising to be Sculptured Software’s most ambitious — and potentially most lucrative — product to date. That called for unorthodox techniques to create as close to an arcade-perfect port as possible. “Our initial strategy was, let’s convert the TI processor’s assembly code into Super Nintendo assembly code. Literally line for line, instruction by instruction,” Peters said. “We had an engineer who we talked to a lot, and he thought he could pull this off,” he continued, referring to Lindquist.
Peters hesitated. Like every contract developer, Sculptured received payments according to milestones. When they submitted work on time, they got paid. Working toward milestones was not only traditional, it was a safe bet. Programmers coded prototypes every step of the way, allowing Sculptured and licensing partners such as Acclaim to see progress. Doing a line-by-line conversion was exponentially riskier. Translating every line of code meant nobody would see the game running until every system — artificial intelligence, animation routines, processing button input — had been implemented. “Let’s just say that scared the shit out of everybody,” Peters admitted. “A game with a six-month development window, and nothing to show for almost half that time? That was scary.”
Lindquist assured Peters he was up to the task. Curious, another programmer watched from afar. Adam Clayton had been at Sculptured almost since its beginning. He’d have headed up Mortal Kombat if he hadn’t been caught up in another game. Still, he kept tabs on every project, and right away he could tell Lindquist was in trouble. Clayton knew that working toward milestones meant writing code that laid groundwork for routines that would need to be written for the next milestone, and the next, and the next, and so on until a game was finished. Working on milestones was like building a house: draw up a blueprint, lay a foundation, put up a framework, and so on, always thinking about the bigger picture.
According to Clayton, Lindquist was working harder instead of smarter, hacking together one milestone only to have to tear most of it down later. “The next milestone was twice as hard because he hadn’t thought about it until he’d finished the last one. He’d have to rewrite his code because he didn’t write it to support what future milestones needed to do. Unless you really plan, you can paint yourself into a corner.”
If there was a how-to guide for getting a game done on time, Clayton watched Lindquist do the exact opposite. Instead of working during the daytime alongside everyone else, he’d pull shifts of seventeen, twenty, or thirty hours straight, then hibernate for days. On top of that, he was writing in a foreign dialect of assembly code that no other programmer could decipher, which meant no one could take over during his absences.
“We had the game playing exactly the same as on the arcade. The timing and everything was perfect.” -Adam Clayton
Lindquist also had an inefficient method of pushing art onto the screen. He’d written a custom tool in assembly that extracted art files from Mortal Kombat’s arcade board and dumped every pixel into the top-left corner of the screen. The problem was that jumbling all the sprites into one location threw off their alignment. “Normally, when you draw a character, you’re saying, ‘draw him relative to this point,’” Clayton explained. “All the boxes are relative to that point. Then you’d use the same point for the next one, and the next one, so the guy moves to the right, and each frame looks good against each other.”
After several weeks of two-steps-forward-five-steps-back progress, Peters removed Lindquist from the project. “Gary had convinced George he could do everything,” Peters said, “that there was no need for other engineers because he was a one-stop shop. The reality was not that. That’s what you do as a producer, director, and manager: You go solve problems.”
Now way behind schedule, Mortal Kombat’s already-tight deadline constricted further. Peters replaced Lindquist with three programmers. John Blackburn programmed Test Your Might, a mini-game in the arcade version where players mashed buttons to fill up a power meter and then chopped through material such as wood, stone, and diamond to earn bonus points. Dave Ross worked on the sound system. Adam Clayton was the Swiss army knife of the project: Anything else that needed doing, particularly finishing the conversion and figuring out how to pare down the arcade version’s artwork, he’d do.
“All of this happened in very short succession,” Peters said. “In a six-month project, there’s not a lot of time to see how things play out. This was happening in real time. Once the project started, the expectations for our time frame went up exponentially, like a tangent curve.” The conversion had begun as a game that may or may not hit, only to grow into one of the season’s most in-demand games as Mortal Kombat’s popularity swelled in arcades. “Literally every day involved major decisions, major strategy, major technical development,” Peters continued.
Clayton was up to the task. As a teen, he’d been the first to write to Atari programmer Warren Robinett and reveal that he had discovered Robinett’s Easter egg in Adventure, a secret room that spelled out his name in blocky letters, and erroneously thought to be the industry’s first Easter egg. In 1987, he joined Sculptured Software as a fresh-faced twenty-two-year-old, designing games for the Atari 2600 before moving on to Atari’s 7800 hardware, then Nintendo’s Game Boy handheld, and finally the Super Nintendo. His experience with conversions dated back to the Game Boy, when he took the source code for the NES version of beloved 8-bit football game Tecmo Bowl and figured out how to translate it to the brick-sized portable. “All the functions they had, all the data tables — it all worked the same way as on the NES version,” Clayton remembered. “Once I got into that code and said, this is what a play is, this is how a play works — I didn’t have to think about that; all I had to do was make my conversion do the same thing the original version was doing. We had the game playing exactly the same as on the arcade. The timing and everything was perfect.”
Peters gave Clayton a crash course in the challenges facing the Mortal Kombat team. Not only had the game fallen behind schedule, there was a ton of digitized speech that didn’t fit into the Super Nintendo’s dedicated, 64-kilobyte block of memory for storing music and sound effects in the S-SMP sound system — hardware designed by Sony employee Ken Kutaragi, who would spearhead creation of the PlayStation a few years later. The third and final problem was arguably the biggest: A gigantic amount of artwork. “There wasn’t a cartridge made that was big enough to hold one-tenth of the art of the original arcade game,” Peters said.
There wasn’t enough time to finish Lindquist’s hacked-together conversion, so Clayton opted for a hybrid approach, translating some code from the arcade machine and filling in blanks with custom routines. The result was a more traditional milestone-oriented progression that provided tangible progress to Acclaim.
Things got easier with the three-man programming team on the assignment, but they still faced an uphill battle. “I wanted to get it to where we could run as much code every frame as what the arcade did. And if we couldn’t have done that, it would have been bad. Sometimes we had to shortchange ourselves,” Clayton said.
Lindquist had lost the “hot space” in the characters, the points at which the game registered connections such as overlapping sprites and collision detection for attacks. By dumping all the artwork to the same spot on the screen. Clayton painstakingly aligned sprites by hand to make sure the spiderweb-like intricacy of connections was in place. Lindquist’s attempt had failed to include anti-aliasing, a graphics technique that smoothed the jagged edges of surfaces and character models to give them a more realistic look. “Johnny Cage would be moving, and his hair would disappear. It was just terrible,” Clayton recalled. Characters had jagged edges in the product that shipped, like paper dolls cut out of pages with their perforations still in place. But it was the best Clayton could do in the little time available to him.
As for the mountainous amount of artwork from the arcade, Peters worked with his programmers to arrive at a solution. “We had to compress the artwork into the maximum cartridge size we could use and also fit within the RAM and VRAM of the Super Nintendo. Those were huge, huge challenges,” he said.
One tool extracted Midway’s artwork and downsized the game’s color palette so it would fit the Super Nintendo’s limitations. The arcade’s larger-than-life characters had to be shrunk down and refitted into eight-by-eight sprites, like building blocks. Their animations had to be trimmed so they were less fluid — consuming less storage space — but still crisp. For that, Sculptured Software used a tool known as Chop. “Its purpose was to take a large image and break it down into eight-by-eight pixel characters and convert those to palettes we set up,” Peters said. “And then — because in Mortal Kombat, you had so many frames of animation per character — go through each frame of animation and compare each eight-by-eight pixel character to see how many duplicates and such that we had so we could build a character set that made up all the animations.”
Many processes were automated with certain goals in mind. The easiest way to cut down animations was to look for duplicate frames: Johnny Cage, for instance, didn’t need three identical frames for his jump kick when one would do just as well, so the tool stripped out redundancies. From there, artists and programmers touched up artwork by hand to ensure that individual avatars stuck to the sixteen-color palette assigned them (with the rest of the on-screen colors being reserved for background artwork and special effects such as fireballs). “Unlike most games that weren’t fighting games, you would use one, sixteen-color palette for this large character made up of eight-by-eight pixel sprites,” said Peters. “We developed a process where one fighter could use multiple instances of these sixteen-color palettes. That allowed us to get a better color effect. That was a lot of back and forth: artistically selecting colors, doing touch-ups, recombining all these things.”
Sculptured’s developers set Chop and other programs to run overnight. By lunchtime, they’d have artwork to sort through and touch up by hand. The net result was characters that looked nearly identical to their arcade counterparts despite being smaller and lacking as many frames. “That became part of the ongoing development of doing fighters: making tweaks, doing touch-ups, getting artists involved, running the process again overnight, rinse and repeat,” Peters explained. “We either ran out of time, or got something where we could say, ‘Hey, this looks pretty good.’ That was the process of how we got the characters to look as good as they did.”
For the game’s audio library, the programmers came up with an ingenious solution. The usual method was to build a sound bank, a chunk of memory to hold all the sound effects and music needed for an arena. But Peters and the team knew that the sound RAM for both Super Nintendo and Genesis was a bottleneck. It was just big enough to hold a few effects, but too small to hold all the sound samples of any match in Mortal Kombat, such as character names, sound effects, and the arena.
Their workaround was to do a resource budget for Mortal Kombat’s SNES cartridge. They knew X amount would need to be allotted for character graphics, Y amount for backgrounds, and so on. Another sizable portion was given over to sound samples such as digitized speech. Instead of limiting themselves by storing a much smaller selection of sounds for a level, the programmers suggested reading sounds from the cartridge one at a time and blasting them to a buffer in sound memory. It was a homegrown solution that Sculptured had used before. They had christened it blast processing. “That was before Sega adopted the slogan,” said Peters. “We could just blast sound from the cartridge onto the game scene. That allowed us to keep the resolution and sample rate of the VO higher, and be able to have more sound samples to use in a given fight, or on a given level. By Mortal Kombat II, I think we’d perfected all this stuff, but Mortal Kombat was testing everything we’d learned about Nintendo’s little box and our capabilities, especially given practically no time in which to do that.”
Some problems were solved. Others, such as controls, fell victim to triage. Everything in the game was framed-based: Characters could punch or kick in midair after reaching a certain frame of animation in their jump; uppercuts and fireballs connected at a specific moment and location on characters. The ideal method for replicating those processes would have been to translate Midway’s own table, but the SNES conversion’s sloppy start and rapidly diminishing time table left the programmers with no choice but to estimate and code it by hand rather than fully converting Midway’s data. The outcome was a control scheme that responded sluggishly, if at all.
“Some offsets, the data and tables for those, had to be recreated by hand,” Peters admitted. “We were stepping through frame by frame on the original game, saying, ‘Sonya’s in this position at this frame; we’re going to copy the same thing proportionally to the Super Nintendo’ — because the pixel ratios of the screens were different, so offsets like that had to be done by hand, and that seemed to be the quickest way to get it done. For those reasons, the controls felt slightly different.”
Throughout development, Peters and the others kept in contact with Probe, the studio charged with the Sega Genesis version. Their respective owners, George Metos at Sculptured and Fergus McGovern over in England, were friends, and thought of their companies as friendly rivals. “There was also friendly competition over who could make the better version,” Peters said. “Nothing [acrimonious], just the usual, ‘We think we could do this better and faster than you!’ That pushed both versions to be as good as they could be within our time frame.”
PAUL CARRUTHERS HAD won the battle, but not the war.
His first conversion for the Sega Genesis, T2: The Arcade Game, had been almost as tough a battle as John Connor’s rebellion against the machines of the future. After a few months of rest, Probe contacted him about converting Mortal Kombat to the Genesis. He could work from home and go to Probe’s office near the end of the project to fix any bugs the QA department found.
Carruthers went into Mortal Kombat with more optimism than he’d felt at the outset of T2’s conversion. “I had all the code. I kind of felt like I had to use that code and emulate it on a much [less powerful] hardware platform. That was the approach I took there, and it worked out very well.”
For a few months, Carruthers’ version dropped off the radar. That was necessary, he explained to his project manager, to do a one-to-one translation. Even with the source code, it was a slow process. He had to interpret Midway’s version and figure out how to write it in the assembly dialect supported by the Genesis console’s 68000 processor. The upside was that it worked. Everything, from the responsiveness of the controls to the arcade’s devilish difficulty — designed, like all arcade games, to keep players feeding it quarters — worked on Sega’s platform exactly as it had on Midway’s arcade board. “Once that framework was in, the game happened in about a week. It all just fell into place because it was copying code.”
Carruthers and the artists at Probe — led by Terry Ford, an ace at extracting and downsizing sprites and animation frames — had to cut corners. The Genesis had as much VRAM as the Super NES, but Nintendo’s 16-bit console had more system memory. Carruthers could only coax Sega’s console to hold an arena and a frame or two of fighter animation in VRAM at one time. “As your characters animate, in every frame you’re pulling in a whole frame of animation for that character during that refresh period,” he explained. “Then the animation frame changes for the next scan. That filled up the entire refresh period, because those were big frames of animation, which meant there was a lot of video information being moved around every frame.”
One problem was that an entire arena had to be stored in memory, since there was no way to tell when players would move left or right, at which time more of the arena would have to be displayed. “If you just take them and reduce them in an automated process, they end up looking poor,” he said. “So we handed them off to an experienced artist who crisped up the edges a bit and played with the palettes. I was involved in cutting those pictures up into smaller chunks to make the sprites out of them.” Carruthers used the Genesis’ refresh period — the point at which the television’s electron beam finishes painting the screen and resets to the top to begin its next sweep — to swap animations in and out, and keep the background loaded.
While the Genesis’s conversion played identically to its coin-op counterpart, its limited color palette — 512 total, sixty-four able to be displayed at once — turned out a grainier port. Backgrounds such as the Palace Gates, an elaborate courtyard with a cobblestone path and décor such as a temple, statues, and vegetation, were truncated: instead of clouds drifting lazily overhead, the sky of the Palace Gates on Genesis was a single blue backdrop. There were more missing frames, too. Others, such as Sub-Zero’s stance, were changed; the blue-clad ninja ended up sharing the stance held by Scorpion, his yellow-and-black-robed counterpart. “We were using every ounce of power and every byte of space, and having to throw out at least half of the animation frames,” Carruthers said.
Compared to the SNES, the Genesis also fell short in terms of audio quality. On the one hand, the Yamaha YM2612 FM chip was outfitted with several channels, and each channel could be tapped to generate samples such as harp, strings, and percussion, and a deep bass that sounded fantastic on high-end (for the time) stereo systems. On the other hand, the chip was slower than Super Nintendo’s sound hardware. Sega had designed its console with two processors, with the Z80 carrying sound duties along with Yamaha’s chip. The Super NES could send data directly to the PPU (pixel processing unit) and its audio processors — Sculptured Software’s “blast processing” — and there was more audio RAM on board than on Sega’s machine.
Graphics and the gameplay loop, all the logic necessary to play the game, received top priority. Any storage left on the cart went to audio. “Every time I talk to audio guys, they’re horrified by this, that audio is the first thing that goes,” Carruthers admitted. “You go, ‘It’s nice, but it’s not absolutely necessary.’ If there isn’t any more room, audio gets cuts.”
Mortal Kombat’s audio palette on Genesis is even more limited than its visuals. While the Super Nintendo version was missing voiceovers such as “Flawless victory” and “Fatality,” the Genesis had been scrubbed of nearly everything else such as the name of the winner at the end of a round. Screams and battle cries were squished down to generic grunts. “We did as much as we could. The audio hardware in the Genesis isn’t great,” Carruthers admitted.
Late in development, Probe asked Carruthers to convert his Genesis code for the Sega CD, a disc drive add-on for the 16-bit console. On paper, the Sega CD version of Mortal Kombat should have been much closer to the arcade source. CDs could hold an order of magnitude more data than a cartridge. Unfortunately, the frustrating process turned out a version subpar compared to the Genesis. Unlike cartridges, which contain ROM chips programmers can modify, CDs are a closed media. “You have to bring all of that off the disc and put it into RAM so you can move it in and out of video RAM,” Carruthers explained. That, coupled by limited memory on the Sega CD hardware, resulted in choppy experience. “We were just about able to do that by having fewer animation frames, and we made everything smaller,” he continued. “The backgrounds weren’t quite right. There were bits missing out of them. What was particularly hard was Shang Tsung, the bloke at the end who can morph.”
Shang Tsung was Mortal Kombat’s final boss. At a glance, he seemed like a pushover: Thousands of years old and in possession of only one special attack, hurling flaming skulls across the screen. His real power was the ability to transform into any of MK’s other characters, even its sub-boss, the four-armed Goro. Shang Tsung’s morphing power required every other fighter’s animation set to be at the Sega CD’s disposable. At a moment’s notice, the computer-controlled boss might morph into Sub-Zero, or Johnny Cage, or Sonya. Those animations couldn’t be swapped in and out of system memory quickly. Every time Shang Tsung morphed into another fighter, and then, around twenty seconds later, morphed back, sprites had to be loaded in and out, halting gameplay for several seconds at a time. The disc made a loud, painful whirring sound as it spun furiously, retrieving and sending data to memory.
“It was just incredibly slow,” Carruthers said. “It ended up as an awful product, absolutely dreadful. It isn’t a problem I found an answer to. There was no answer. We had to use fewer animation frames, which means it looks worse than the [Genesis version], and the whole idea of that more powerful machine was that it should have looked better. It was a shame.”
JEFF PETERS ENJOYED his quiet life. The tranquility of the suburb where he lived provided a pleasant contrast to the long hours and crazy demands of his work at Sculptured Software. His neighbors were friendly, and tightly knit by the bonds of Mormonism, the dominant religion for large swathes of Utah. Every morning on his way to the office, he’d make small talk with friends out watering lawns, fetching the paper, or getting ready for their own commute.
One morning, Peters said hello to a neighbor and received a stony glare. Peters went cold. They know, he thought.
“I was ostracized in the neighborhood I lived in because they found out I worked on Mortal Kombat,” he said.
Peters didn’t realize he’d been cut out of the inner circle right away. Every now and then, his doorbell would ring, and he’d find one of the neighborhood kids peering in. “Do you guys do drugs?” one blurted. Startled, Peters said no. The kid scampered home.
“Do you worship Satan?” another tyke asked.
“Are you really gay?”
“My mom says you’re going to hell. How come she says that?”
His all-time favorite question never failed to brighten his mood. “My mom says we can’t play Mortal Kombat, but can we come in and play it at your house?”
Mortal Kombat’s violence bled into every aspect of the lives of developers assigned to its conversions. “One of the key things that Sculptured and Probe had to solve completely different was the whole violence thing,” Peters recalled. “This gets into the backdrop of things going on with the gaming industry.”
Things were touchy at the office. One of the programmers went to Peters and insisted he could only work on Mortal Kombat if his name were not attached to the project. “If his family came to visit the studio, we’d tell them he was working on something else,” Peters said. “Half the studio had grown up here in Utah and refused to have anything to do with Mortal Kombat. This stigma, depending on your worldview, made Mortal Kombat something either really cool, or Satan incarnate.”
Mortal Kombat’s gore was a sensitive subject for American society at large. The moment word of fatalities spread beyond arcades and into schools, homes, and churches, parents and politicians went on the warpath. Editors at magazines like Time wrote special features that questioned whether video games, formerly the domain of happy-go-lucky cartoon characters like Nintendo’s Mario, had finally gone too far by depicting graphic death with character models that resembled real people instead of mushrooms and turtles. Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut joined forces with other politicians to crack down on Mortal Kombat and other adult games, opining that their gruesome content did not differ from an R-rated movie and shouldn’t be marketed toward children.
Nintendo was firmly on the side of politicians like Liebermann. The Japanese game maker had built a reputation as a purveyor of fun for the whole family. Court hearings that devolved into reps from Sega and Nintendo hurling insults at each other eventually led to the formation of the Electronic Ratings Software Board (ESRB) in the summer of 1994. Games were assigned ratings intended to give parents a heads-up about their content.
But late in the summer of 1993, with Mortal Monday fast approaching, the ESRB was still nearly a year away. Sega and Nintendo gave their consent to hosting Mortal Kombat on their platforms as long as Probe, Sculptured Software, Midway, and Acclaim held to certain rules. Sega’s compromise was sticking an “MA-13” rating on the Sega Genesis version, the rough equivalent of a PG-13 rating on a movie.
Nintendo went further than trusting parents to decide if their kids were mature enough to handle MK’s bloodshed. An internal division called The Mario Club exercised nearly total control over the publishing process. “You’d get game and feature criticism,” said Peters. “You’d get it from their gaming analysts. First, you’d get approval to make the game. Then you’d submit the game for approval. Then they would give you bug reports, and then they’d give you qualitative reports of, ‘Here’s the stuff that’s good, here’s the stuff that’s bad.’”
While content creators such as Midway owned their IP, the Mario Club, on behalf of Nintendo exercised control over what form that IP could take on Nintendo platforms. Content the analysts deemed unfit, for any reason, had to be changed. “Nintendo’s goal of their new publishing agreements was to avoid what happened with the [the market crash of ‘83],” Peters explained, “by controlling and regulating the content so that shelves weren’t filled with unsold crap again.”
Extreme fatalities were changed. Johnny Cage kicked through his opponent’s chest instead of punching off their head, Sub-Zero froze his defeated foe and shattered them into blocks of ice, Rayden electrocuted his victims into a pile of ash, and Kano punched through their chest and ripped out an amorphous gray blob that could have been anything, but was not explicitly a beating heart. Tamer fatalities — with the definition of “tamer” being at Nintendo’s discretion — such as Scorpion’s flame and Sonya’s fireball kiss went untouched.
Sculptured’s small team came up with the substitute fatalities, but had to run them by Nintendo. Hiding the fatalities behind a cheat was out of the question. “Acclaim and Sculptured would have been sued for everything that they had,” said Peters. The developers were so paranoid at accidentally leaving a trace of a taboo fatality in the code — their approach of a partial conversion meant one could have slipped in before they understood what its code was used for — that they checked and rechecked to make sure they were dropped. “The fear of somebody on our team accidentally or intentionally putting in a code that turned blood on or bringing in original fatalities — that was real,” Peters continued.
“We developed coin-op games for the arcade crowd, which in our experience skewed older than console players,” added Mortal Kombat co-creator John Tobias. “But, in hindsight the industry itself was maturing and it took a while for us to see that happening. Unfortunately, I think Nintendo tried to take advantage of opportunistic politicians looking for headlines to gain an advantage over their competition with Sega and it backfired. Thankfully, when the dust settled the ESRB was the result and I think it was a reasonable reaction to the whole dilemma. It was an acknowledgement of video games as a legitimate form of entertainment that caters to all ages.”
Sega operated under looser guidelines. Higher-ups knew that catering to older players would make Sega’s version more appealing to that demographic. The product’s engineer, Paul Carruthers, was to make it happen. Carruthers was on-site to help with bug testing near the end of production when permission to sneak blood and gore into the game came down from on high. “I moved down there for a period of maybe a month, three months at the worst,” he said. “They would put me up in a bed-and-breakfast in Croydon, and I became an honorary employee. It was close to the end that we found out things like Nintendo wouldn’t allow blood in the SNES version, and they wouldn’t allow blood in Germany. There was this backlash against what was a very violent game.”
By default, Mortal Kombat on Genesis was clean, without even a drop of the sweat found in the SNES version. Sega had voluntarily scrubbed out blood and replaced fatalities with replacements even tamer than those designed by Sculptured Software: Johnny Cage kicks his opponent across the screen, and Sub-Zero uppercuts them, sending them flying higher than usual before they crash to the ground. That would satisfy the politicians and parents up in arms over the game’s violence, and it was the responsible thing to do. But at the main menu, players could press down, up, left, left, A, right, down, spelling out DULLARD, to reveal a cheat menu. In the secret screen, they could do things like enable blood, which also reinstated the original arcade fatalities, and choose which arena to fight in.
“I came up with DULLARD, because it just amused me to arrange everything that was at your fingertips: A, B, C, and D, U, L, R for the movement. There’s not much more you can do with that,” said Carruthers.
Later, someone at Acclaim worried DULLARD would be too hard for players to remember. “The ABACABB code was forced upon me: I was instructed to put in a code word that only used A, B, and C.”
He wanted a mnemonic, but the limited number of buttons on the Genesis controller — three by default, though players could pay extra for a six-button controller — left him without much wiggle room. He settled on ABACABB, a nod to the album “Abacab” by rock band Genesis. At a screen just before the main menu, players could press A-B-A-C-A-B-B to enable all the blood and gory fatalities from the arcade hidden behind the thin veil of censorship. (All other cheats remained hidden in the DULLARD menu.) Carruthers’ last-minute addition became known as “the blood code” among fans and journalists, and remains one of gaming’s most infamous cheats.
Sega and Probe knew the existence of ABACABB and DULLARD would incur the wrath of Liebermann and parental groups. They kept both codes secret, trusting that some enterprising player would discover them. From there, word-of-mouth would imbue the Genesis version with a mystique that — fingers crossed — would give Sega an advantage over Nintendo in the 16-bit “console war.”
Future GamePro editor Dan Amrich and a friend were among the first to crack the DULLARD code. Amrich had just graduated college and had pre-ordered Mortal Kombat for the Genesis, his console of choice. It was scheduled to release on September 13, but his local store broke the street date and sold Amrich’s friend Carl Elston a copy of the game early. Elston called up Amrich and mentioned that someone on Usenet, a bulletin board system where users could post messages about virtually any topic, claimed there was a code for the Genesis that made it nearly identical to the arcade. He was unable able to test the code, so he asked Amrich to do it.
“DULLARD opened a developer debug menu that let you not only toggle the blood on and off, but several other dev-test things, like making Reptile appear,” said Amrich, referring to Mortal Kombat’s secret character.
Amrich entered the menu and found switches that could be toggled on or off. Some, like “Blood,” were obvious. Others were head-scratchers; Flag 0, Flag 1, Flag 2, and several others were set to on or off, but contained no context as to what they enabled or disabled. “The only way to determine what they did was to go through, methodically, and test them. So I did that basically all weekend and came up with the definitive guide for what seven of the eight flags did.”
Amrich wrote up an exhaustive document that detailed the functionality of each flag. He asked his dad to fax it to GamePro, his favorite magazine, which gave a free t-shirt to anyone who sent in a cheat that could be verified. “A few days later I got a phone call from one of their editors, asking me how I got the code and if I was using this on a retail copy of the game. They had the EPROM for review, but they hadn’t received final retail versions yet. I assured them it was legit and told them how I’d figured out all the flags.”
The editor who called was Lawrence “Scary Larry” Neves. (It was GamePro policy for each editor to write under multiple pseudonyms to make the magazine’s scrappy editorial team appear larger than it really was.) Neves thanked Amrich for his submission and complemented him on his writing. Neves informed him that the cheat would run as a two-page spread because of all the hype surrounding Mortal Kombat. As a bonus, he paid Amrich the ultimate compliment. “We don’t usually get cheat submissions that are this clear and complete,” he said.
Amrich mentioned he was looking for freelance work. Neves said the magazine didn’t have the budget for it at the moment, but he was welcome to try again. Several weeks later, Amrich’s t-shirt arrived in the mail. It was too small. A few years later, Amrich landed a job at the magazine. His first official act as a GamePro editor was to claim what was rightfully his.
“I remember finding a GamePro shirt in a storage area and proclaiming, ‘This is mine! You owe me this!”
MORTAL MONDAY WAS coming.
On September 13, 1993, Mortal Kombat would storm the Sega Genesis, Sega Game Gear, Super Nintendo, and Nintendo Game Boy platforms. Every day leading up to Mortal Monday was as exciting for consumers as it was stressful for the teams at Probe and Sculptured Software.
There was more on the line than getting the code, artwork, and audio ready. Cartridges for Super NES had to be ordered directly from Nintendo and were shipped from Japan by boat. That meant Acclaim had to estimate how many cartridges it could sell on each system. It was a requirement that could lead to financial disaster. Orders had to be placed approximately six months out from a release for the shipment to arrive on time. If a publisher overestimated, they were stuck with cartridges they’d bought but couldn’t sell. If they underestimated, they had to wait for another batch to arrive from Japan; by the time it came into port, consumers might have moved on to the next hot game.
Acclaim left nothing to chance. Executives put in orders for every cartridge ROM chip that could be manufactured in the world. “For Mortal Monday, there wasn’t a discussion of, ‘If we could have made more, we would have,’ or ‘It’s too bad they only put in an order for this many million.’ No,” stated Jeff Peters. “They bought up the worldwide production. That’s the pressure we were all under.”
By August 1993, the pressure was so great that Acclaim sent producers to work on-site alongside both teams to make sure production finished with enough time to manufacture and ship out cartridges. “Them being a marketing company, there wasn’t much they could do other than maybe decisions that would affect the marketing campaign,” said Peters. Moreover, the producers couldn’t measure up to the developers’ schedule. Sculptured’s team worked around the clock, and the producers burned out in days. Acclaim sent backup so the producers could work in shifts.
“From their point of view, they were protecting their investment,” Peters continued. “Or if there was a decision to be made, one of Acclaim’s people could make it faster on the ground with us than out in New York. It was just funny to us that they couldn’t keep up with our pace.”
At an Electronics Boutique store where he worked, Hughes Johnson lugged the red binder over to the counter and dropped it with a sigh. It landed with a thud. To Johnson and his colleagues at Electronics Boutique, this binder was their bible. It contained pre-orders for upcoming games. During every shift, customers would add their name and phone number to the binder, guaranteeing that the store would hold a copy for forty-eight hours. Claiming a copy of a video game before its release was still new. Last year, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 became the first video game to release at the same time around the globe when Sega had coordinated shipments of product around Tuesday, November 24, 1992, a day the company dubbed “Sonic 2sday.”
Acclaim’s effort looked to pay off: As Mortal Monday approached, Johnson estimated that pre-orders for Genesis outnumbered Super Nintendo players ten to one. Acclaim had a big investment to protect. Over the last several months, over 70,000 consumers had called the studio to inquire after a release date for Mortal Kombat. The demand was so great that the company set up pre-orders with retailers to get a better idea of how many copies they could expect to sell for each of the four main platforms: Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Nintendo Game Boy, and Sega Game Gear.
Promotion escalated in parallel to fevered anticipation. Comic books were plastered with advertisements showing gameplay and thumbnail graphics of the fighters with text commanding players to Prepare Yourself for Mortal Monday. Gaming magazines ran several ads per issue. A television commercial showed teenagers tearing through streets while pumping their fists and shouting “MORTAL KOMBAT!” at the top of their lungs. All summed up, Acclaim had invested $10 million in the game’s advertising, and it seemed poised to pay off.
“I have to say that while MK was born in a way that was completely organic, literally a black box with a game in it that drew hordes of players with no advertising, the marketing folks at Acclaim recognized its viral nature and went all in with their ad campaign,” says co-creator John Tobias. “That took some foresight because they poured big-time dollars behind the marketing effort, which catapulted something that was already very popular into something that became a pop culture phenomenon.”
Tobias, who was busy working on MKII, heard about Mortal Monday from friends and family who had noticed ads in the subway or on TV. He remembered getting involved in the campaign only once: When someone at Acclaim accidentally mirrored the franchise’s dragon emblem so it faced the wrong direction. “I remember giving them the analogy that just like you should never mess with Superman’s ‘S,’ so they shouldn’t ever mess with our dragon icon. They bought that feedback and the next iteration was a perfect version of the dragon icon from our arcade game. Everything from that point forward became about authenticity with the arcade source material. I think Acclaim saw the value in that.”
As the weeks leading up to Mortal Monday dwindled to days, store owners checked reserve lists. At most locations, a handful of customers had plunked down cash for the Sega Genesis version for every one looking forward to the Super Nintendo cart. “We knew we had our hands tied behind our backs with Nintendo,” said Peters, who braced for the fallout. “We knew fans wanted the blood, wanted the fatalities, and there was no escaping that. Our expectation was that just because of the blood [code], the Genesis version would probably outsell us. All we could do was make the best game we could, and hope people could appreciate it for what it was, under the constraints and rules of engagement we were given.”
Their predictions panned out. Word of the Genesis version’s blood code spread, and Sega more than made up the lead Nintendo had gained by securing exclusive rights to the console port of Street Fighter II a year earlier.
“Pre-review career, I was a Genesis guy,” said former GamePro editor Dan Amrich. “I was in college when I got my Genesis, having missed the entire NES cycle because, as my mom put it, ‘You have all those Atari tapes.’ Most of my SNES friends fell into the SFII camp because they got such a good version of that game and they had it so early. MK felt like a win for ‘the other guys’ and kind of silenced the smugness from my SNES friends. ‘Who needs blood?’ Well, to me, that forbidden, adult aspect was part of the appeal, and I wanted it. I wound up owning both systems before too long because I started my game review career around that time, but I never picked up the SNES MK — I figured I had the definitive home version already.”
Paul Carruthers gave little thought to his Genesis port’s impending arrival. He was already working on other conversions and expected Mortal Kombat to come and go like any other game. One night, he met up with friends to see Jurassic Park at the local cinema. Taking their seats, they asked him how work was going. “I’ve been working on this fighting game,” he told them. “It’s called Mortal Kombat, and it’s supposed to be a big deal.” They smiled and nodded.
When the lights dimmed, trailers for upcoming films played. Next up was an advertisement for Mortal Kombat. One by one, his friends slowly turned to Carruthers wearing shocked expressions. “Isn’t that your game?” one asked weakly.
“A lot of the people I work with now were born after this came out,” he said. “It’s not very important to them. They don’t understand what a big deal it was. So I don’t think about it often. It’s only when people like you [author David L. Craddock] phone up and want to talk about it,” he finished, laughing.
Jeff Peters remembers his time spearheading Mortal Kombat on Super NES fondly. The port sold well, because anything Mortal Kombat sold well. But what he remembers most is the stage of history on which the saga around Midway’s premier fighter played out.
“It definitely hit a very specific time in the industry where a bunch of things happening in the background affected the development of this game in particular. So from an industry and historical point of view, it’s a really interesting time. Not just the game, but everything that was going on behind the scenes, too.”
My latest book, Long Live Mortal Kombat, is funding for the next day on Kickstarter, and takes a deep dive into the arcade era of the MK franchise. This excerpt comes from Arcade Perfect, a book I wrote in 2019 that delves into how arcade games were ported to home systems.