(Music: terrible ‘90s techno)
In 1993, one game dominated both the arcades
— and the airwaves.
Mortal Kombat.
Mortal Kombat.
Mortal Kombat.
Mortal Kombat.
MOOOORTAL KOOOOMBAT!
The success came as a shock to the four-man
team who made the game. They expected a run
of maybe 200 machines, but the game became
an unexpected blockbuster, drawing the kind
of publicity money couldn’t buy.
Moooortal Kombaaaat.
But before this media circus had come to town,
publisher Acclaim had already taken a gamble
on Mortal Kombat, licensing the game from
Midway for home release. And the teams they’d
contracted to port the game found themselves
at the centre of a $10m marketing blitz.
These developers had to work out how to port
an arcade machine that cost thousands of dollars
to the $200 hardware in people’s homes…
without sacrificing the essence of the game.
The pressure to deliver was immense. Starting
from scratch, they had only six months to
produce versions of Mortal Kombat that were
as close as possible to ‘arcade perfect’…
and millions of players were waiting.
(strangulated scream)
Acclaim contracted two different companies
to deliver the Super NES and Mega Drive ports.
Each studio was already established as one
of the most technically adept developers on
the platform, and they’d work independently.
In Salt Lake City, Sculptured Software was
chosen to port the game to the Super Nintendo,
under the project leadership of Jeff Peters.
“The games we were doing were reaching the
top of the charts. 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.”
Across the Atlantic, the task was given to
Croydon-based Probe Software. The developer
they asked to deliver the Mega Drive port
was Paul Carruthers.
“Probe was very close with Acclaim at the
time and I guess the successful completion
of T2: The Arcade Game – as well as some
other Acclaim Mega Drive projects they were
handling at the time – meant that Probe
was first in line.”
(The Mega Drive was - of course - known as
the Genesis in North America. I’m just going
to refer to it as the Mega Drive in this script,
because that’s what the people who wrote
the port called it.)
Converting an arcade game to the home could
be a tricky business. Because arcade machines
needed to compete for players’ pocket change,
cabinets were often generously specced, with
the flashiest graphics and sound capabilities
that manufacturers could afford. Console hardware
was advertised as powerful, but it also needed
to be cheap, so the machines fell a long way
short of arcade hardware: slower processors,
less RAM, less storage capacity, fewer audio
channels, fewer colours, fewer sprites at
once; the list of limitations added up to
a major performance gap.
The developer of a console port had to navigate
through this minefield of constraints, trying
to trick the hardware into doing as much as
possible and choosing the right compromises
to make when it couldn’t. All the while
trying to create an adaptation that players
would consider worthy of the name.
“We were literally trying to shove this
into a really small box that this game was
not designed to run on. 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.”
The teams had access to Midway’s arcade
source code, and both started converting it
line by line to their respective console’s
native architecture. If it worked, the payoff
would be a port that behaved indistiguishably
from the original.
The biggest problem faced by the teams was
storage.
Both developers had to fit Mortal Kombat on
to a 2 megabyte cartridge — Acclaim weren’t
willing to spend more money for a bigger ROM.
That meant making hard decisions about what
to leave out and squeezing in the rest of
the data as compactly as possible.
“There wasn't a cartridge made that was
big enough to hold one-tenth of the art of
the original arcade game.”
Each team built tools to extract the sprites
from the arcade ROMs and downscale them to
the limits of their respective hardware.
Both teams relied on heavy compression. Sculptured
tiled sprites into a sort of mosaic, finding
similar blocks across different frames and
characters, reducing the amount of unique
graphics to store. Probe removed background
details to save space and to ensure a clearer
render on the Mega Drive’s 64-colour palette.
And both teams simplified the animations.
“We were using every ounce of power and
every byte of space, and having to throw out
at least half of the animation frames.”
Voice samples were a big part of the appeal,
and the quotability, of Mortal Kombat in the
arcade.
“FLAWLESS VICTORY.”
Sculptured knew a technique where samples
could be channeled straight from the cart
to the sound chip without first loading them
into RAM — a process they called ‘blasting’.
With their efficient graphics compression
working in their favour, they had enough space
left on the cart to fit most of the arcade
game’s samples.
Probe didn’t have that luxury. It had a
handful of samples and a few generic grunts,
“GET OVER HERE!”
but the Mega Drive version was missing voiced
character names and some of the best-known
lines.
“Every time I talk to audio guys, they're
horrified by this, that audio is the first
thing that goes. You go, ‘It's nice, but
it's not absolutely necessary.' We did as
much as we were able to.”
When the ports were first commissioned, they
were just another contract job for Sculptured
and Probe. But throughout development, the
arcade game’s popularity kept rising, seemingly
without limit. What had started out as a long
shot for Acclaim turned into one of the most
anticipated home releases of the year.
Faced with a surprise hit, they went all-in
on publicity. A ten million dollar marketing
campaign — one of the most costly ever for
a game — would build to a simultaneous American
and European launch on four consoles: the
Super NES, Mega Drive, Game Boy, and Game
Gear. September 13th 1993 was christened Mortal
Monday.
Sculptured had one more issue to deal with
than Probe, and it would prove decisive. Nintendo
had a family-friendly image to uphold.
“To meet our game guidelines, we insisted
that one of our largest licensees, Acclaim
Entertainment, removed the blood and death
sequences present in the arcade version of
Mortal Kombat before we would approve this
game. We did this knowing that our competitor
would leave these scenes in and with full
knowledge that we would make more money if
we included the offensive material.”
Actually, both Sega and Nintendo wanted the
game’s violence toned down; both versions
would play free of gore by default. But close
to the end of production, word came down from
Sega to include the blood and fatalities from
the arcade version, behind a cheat code that
would be guaranteed to leak.
Jeff Peters had no such liberty. Nintendo’s
word was law, and they were insistent; no
blood, no gore. But beyond that, he found
their demands could be somewhat flexible.
“Nintendo’s rules of engagement seemed
very blurred at first: Blood was bad. Ripping
out a guy’s heart was bad. But flaming a
guy into a skeleton passed the censor. So
we had to creatively figure out how to push
that line as much as possible.”
They replaced the arcade’s fatality animations
with softer versions, and blood became sweat
with a palette shift. Peters remembers the
paranoia that some act of violence would slip
through unnoticed from the arcade source code.
“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.”
As Mortal Monday approached, the pressure
on the teams mounted. Running short on time,
Sculptured’s programmers stopped referring
to the arcade source code, and tried to recreate
the gameplay through observation and approximation.
In the final weeks, Acclaim flew in producers
to assist both teams on the ground. But by
this point, the team at Sculptured were working
around the clock. The visiting producers couldn’t
match the hours of the staff - Acclaim had
to send more so they could work in shifts.
“It was starting to become clear how big
a deal it was going to be, and I started receiving
phone calls at Probe from mysterious American
characters who wouldn’t say who they were,
but were very interested in how development
was coming along. These people turned out
to be Wall Street stockbrokers who were trying
to work out how likely the game was to be
late, as this would have a big effect on Acclaim’s
share value. It was very scary to think that
Acclaim’s very survival was in question
if I didn’t pull my finger out and get on
with it.”
“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. They
bought up the worldwide production. That's
the pressure we were all under.”
In the end, both teams met their deadline
for release to manufacturing. But not everyone
was happy.
“It all felt rushed, and we would have loved
to have more time to validate the movements,
the placements on the screen, where the characters
go when they get thrown and get hit — a
whole bunch of little detailed stuff that
would’ve been fantastic if we’d had a
couple more weeks or another month.
September 13th. Mortal Monday. The companies’
months of hard work finally hit the streets.
And the effort and the publicity paid off.
Mortal Kombat took $50 million in sales, dwarfing
the success of the arcade version, in one
day.
Which version played better has been a matter
of fervent argument for over 25 years — and
if you want to continue that debate, the comments
are just down there. The SNES version indisputably
had better graphics and sound — a closer
resemblance to the arcade. The Mega Drive
version was choppier, didn’t look as good,
and its sampled sound was minimal. But it
played more responsively, and behind the gore
code that every player knew about, included
blood and fatalities.
According to Blake Harris, the Mega Drive
version outsold the competition by a factor
of five. Nintendo’s policy on mature content
had handed Sega a substantial victory in the
console war.
“We knew we had our hands tied behind our
backs with Nintendo. We knew fans wanted the
blood, wanted the fatalities, and there was
no escaping that. Our expectation was that
just because of the blood, 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.”
The heyday of arcade ports seems like a distant
memory. If you can find an arcade these days,
the situation has kind of flipped; you’re
likely to see games there that have been ported
from home machines, or even smartphones. Today’s
biggest franchises, including yesterday’s
arcade mainstays, debut in the home.
But in the golden age of the arcade, ports
were big business, and the work was difficult,
technical, and often thankless. The story
of the porting of Mortal Kombat is a microcosm
of the many complexities faced by the people
who made them happen.
There’s a coda to this story.
After the success of the first game, Acclaim
went on to produce the home versions of Mortal
Kombat 2, calling on the same companies to
work on the SNES and Mega Drive ports of the
sequel.
But this time, Nintendo, who a few months
earlier had been so outspoken in defence of
their policy, had a sudden change of heart.
They announced that the upcoming Super Nintendo
version of Mortal Kombat 2 would ship with
blood and gore intact. On release in 1994,
the Super Nintendo version outsold its rival
2 to 1.
This video was adapted from a chapter from
David Craddock’s new book ‘Arcade Perfect’.
As well as a ton more information about the
porting of Mortal Kombat, the book contains
stories and interviews about the home ports
of 15 other arcade games, including Space
Invaders, Pac-Man, Street Fighter 2 and NBA
Jam. If you enjoyed this video, I think you’ll
love the book. It’s available on Kindle
and in paperback.
My thanks to David Craddock, to the wonderful
Jacob Geller and HeyItMeBen for letting me
borrow their voices, and to the backers on
patreon.com/retrohistories, who get weekly
exclusive posts, and without whom this video
wouldn’t exist.
I’m Chris; I’ll see you again in the past!
