Long Live Mortal Kombat: Round 1: The Fatalities and Fandom of the Arcade Era by David L. Craddock

Author:David L. Craddock [Craddock, David L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Digital Monument Press, LLC
Published: 2022-10-08T06:00:00+00:00

Part 3

Knowledge and Power

Chapter 28

Business As Usual

Mortal Kombat II ’s development had been a slow ramp-up. Ed Boon and John Tobias took their time at the beginning, considering the sequel’s direction. However, there comes a point in every development schedule when creative decisions and technological realities reached an impasse. A technique or art direction they believe should work never gets off the ground and they have to rewrite, reanimate, redo. Then there’s the desire shared by all designers to make the coolest game possible. Passion collides with reality, giving way to weeks or months of 14- and 16-hour days. Some days they work around the clock, sweating every detail.

Their reward for making a successful game is to do it all over again.

Tobias usually finished his work first. That’s typical in game development: Artists and writers complete their assets—scripts, animations, backgrounds—first, but programmers work right until release and often beyond. Completing his tasks did not earn Tobias a reprieve. Once MKII’s art was locked in, he wore other hats, the same as he had done on Smash TV and Total Carnage: testing the game and giving feedback, driving to test locations to pick up quarters and fix glitched machines—going as far as dismantling a cabinet and cleaning joysticks and contact points such as where buttons meet the switches they’re connected to—anything the team needed to continue their march toward release.

After completing Mortal Kombat II’s 3.1 revision, the team declared it finished. No more changes to artwork, no more tweaking code to fix bugs or glitches. They had earned a break.

Rest periods were a rarity in the coin-op business. Developers finished one game and, in the same breath, moved on to the next. Mortal Kombat was slightly different. There was more merchandise connected to the franchise than was customary for Midway’s games. Tobias spent his brief respite working on another collector’s edition comic book advertised in MKII’s attract mode and reveled in the process. He still loved comic books; writing a story in the Mortal Kombat universe gave him a break from pushing pixels.

The team’s creative reprieve was over almost as soon as it began. Midway’s developers had a blue-collar Chicago work ethic: finish a project, take a breath, then get back to work.

By November 1994, Ken Fedesna was overseeing several games. Two of those were Mortal Kombat II and Killer Instinct. After acquiring Tradewest that April, Midway re-christened the studio as Williams Entertainment, Inc. The plan was for Williams Entertainment to market and convert home versions of Mortal Kombat 3 in parallel to Boon, Tobias, and their team developing the coin-op. “Our deal with Acclaim had expired,” says Fedesna. “Mortal Kombat 3”—stylized as MK3 on the arcade marquee, packaging, and in most marketing materials—”was going to be a big thing for Williams Entertainment.”

Midway planned to take the company public in 1996. Their agenda for the final months of 1994 and the entirety of 1995 was to make the company as strong as possible. “There was huge pressure to make sure we

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