Kool Stuff [5]: Why Mortal Kombat Never Appeared on NES
This post is part of Kool Stuff, a companion book to Long Live Mortal Kombat: Round 1 (now on Kickstarter!) that contains interviews I was unable to do before hitting Long Live MK’s deadline. Subscribe to Episodic Content to keep up with news on Long Live MK, and to follow along with Kool Stuff as new chapters are published.
Take a stroll down memory lane with me.
It's September 13, 1993. Mortal Monday. You're in line to buy Acclaim's hotly anticipated port of Midway's bloody fighting game, Mortal Kombat, at one of dozens of North American retailers. You have four distinct versions to choose from. On Super NES, you've got crisp, near-arcade perfect graphics but sluggish controls, sweat instead of blood, and creative but neutered fatalities. If you want kombat on the go, Game Boy and Game Gear, while not the ideal hosts for MK's photorealistic, digitized graphics and gory spectacle, have got you covered. The port for Genesis, known as Mega Drive elsewhere, is the clear-cut choice for those who supported Sega doing, as the marketing slogan went, what Ninten-don't.
If you lived in Brazil or certain regions of Europe, you had a fifth version to choose from: Sega's 8-bit console, the Master System.
While writing Long Live Mortal Kombat and Arcade Perfect, my 2019 book about conversions of arcade games to home platforms, I learned a great deal of information about MK1's ports. What I and other fans have wondered, however, was why Nintendo's 8-bit console was never graced with Sub-Zero and friends.
It's a fair question. Nintendo didn't release its 16-bit console until 1990, when it began a three-phase rollout: November as the Super Famicom in some regions, again in 1991 as the Super NES in other territories, and yet again in 1992, when Europe and Australia rounded out releases. The NES continued to sell through the first few years of the '90s, and Disney's The Lion King, the platform's last officially licensed game, released in 1995. Acclaim Entertainment, the publisher that had the license to distribute home versions of Midway titles, was the first North American publisher to release a game on NES. All that data suggests that Acclaim would have benefitted from contracting a studio to port Mortal Kombat to the 8-bit platform.
Right?
"It was talked about. There was a confluence of issues," says Rob Holmes, co-founder of Acclaim.
“It would be difficult to declare your first loss and then say, 'Okay, let's start development of an 8-bit title.” -Rob Holmes, co-founder of Acclaim Entertainment
The first of those issues was the responsibility of Holmes and his co-founders, Greg Fischbach and Jim Scoroposki, carried as the heads of a public company. "Positioning-wise, you want to show yourself as moving forward, not dragging or going backwards" to shareholders, says Holmes. "Putting that aside, we talked about Mortal Kombat on NES, but the install base for the 8-bit system had fallen off a cliff."
According to sales data, Nintendo sold 15.7 million NES consoles in 1990. One year later, that number dropped by half to 6.1 million. There were myriad reasons for that drop-off: fierce competition from Sega's 16-bit Mega Drive, publishers shifting focus to Nintendo's 16-bit platform, and the public perception of the NES as old news. Mobygames.com shows that Acclaim published half a dozen NES titles in 1992 (Double Dragon III, Wizards & Warriors III, The Simpsons: Bartman Meets Radioactive Man, Ferrari Grand Prix Challenge, Krusty's Super Fun House, and George Foreman's KO Boxing), but those games likely entered development before Acclaim stepped back from the NES or were released to meet contractual obligations for licenses such as The Simpsons.
Mortal Kombat debuted in arcades in October 1992, and home versions were in the works in early 1993. Breaking ground on a new NES game in '93, almost two years into the Super NES's lifespan and nearly twice as many for Mega Drive/Genesis, made zero sense. "Another reason--still using math--was the decline in what we called active users," Holmes continues. "You had a big install base on older hardware, but the people who were playing them rather than consumers saying, 'Hey, let's spend a Saturday afternoon going through old games,' was pretty small. The NES had rapidly fallen down the food chain in terms of marketing demographics; socioeconomically because of pricing; and the quality level had gone down."
Still, that doesn't explain why Sega got an 8-bit port of MK when Nintendo did not. Wouldn't Sega's 8-bit sales have been just as bad, if not worse than the market-favorite NES?
Yes, and no.
Originally released as the Mark III in Japan in 1985, the Master System was rebranded in North America by the newly established Sega of America and set to compete against the NES upon release in September 1986. Less than a year later, Sega offloaded US distribution rights for the floundering Master System to Tonka in the hopes that a toy company would fare better against Nintendo's mega-popular system, marketed as a toy to North American retailers.
In other territories, the story was vastly different. "Probe had been churning out Master System games forever, and they were working on MK ports," Holmes explains. Probe was the development studio contracted by Acclaim to port Mortal Kombat to Genesis, Game Boy, and Game Gear. Sculptured Software was in charge of the Super NES adaptation. Rod Cousens was the head of Acclaim's branch in Europe, where the Master System was still selling well. It had launched in 1987 and was the best-selling console in that region and others such as Brazil, markets Nintendo had largely ignored and where Sega had a head start thanks to distribution agreements with companies like Tectoy, another toy manufacturer.
"Sega had kept that base alive, and Europe was slower to adopt Nintendo hardware," Holmes says. "Rod said flat out, 'I want [Mortal Kombat] on the Master System if we can get it.' That made our decision pretty easy."
Probe boss Fergus McGovern contracted Keith Burkhill to port Mortal Kombat to the Master System and Game Gear. The parity between Master System and Game Gear was another advantage for Sega, which based its handheld on the 8-bit console's architecture. "They're exactly the same. There's hardly any difference at all," Burkhill says. The only major difference between one hardware base and the other was the Master System's higher screen resolution, since it output games to television sets instead of a tiny screen made for a handheld. Burkhill recalls porting MK to the Master System first, and then McGovern "wanted a quote for how much it would cost to" to port it to Game Gear, Burkhill says. "I gave him quite a high sum and ported it in a week. There was very little to do."
"Even if we solved all the technical stuff, getting the game to play with only two buttons would have meant a complete redesign of the game.” -Jeff Peters, project manager at Sculptured Software
But suppose things had worked out differently. Suppose, for instance, the NES was selling well enough to justify an 8-bit port of Mortal Kombat. Sculptured Software would have been on deck to do it, but the engineers in the Salt Lake City-based studio had no interest. "Yet another variable, and this is testing my recollection, is that Sculptured Software had more constrained resources [than Probe]. They had less of an appetite to even think of going the NES route," Holmes says.
Jeff Peters, a project manager at Sculptured Software who captained the conversions of Mortal Kombat and MKII onto Super NES—and, later, MK3 to Super NES and Genesis—says Holmes's recollection is correct. An NES port "was being discussed at the Acclaim level, but it was only ever just discussed," says Peters. "No action or technical analysis was ever made by us at Sculptured. We never thought NES would be realistic based on the severe technical challenges, so it never rose above just knowing Acclaim had considered it at one time, but that was it."
The technical challenges Peters alluded to were legion. "Processor speed, four-color sprites, limited backgrounds, small cart size, general memory, limited buttons on controllers... Pretty much everything," says Peters. "Even if we solved all the technical stuff, getting the game to play with only two buttons would have meant a complete redesign of the game.”
Keith Burkhill jumped through hoops to convert MK's five-button control setup to the three-button inputs for Master System and Game Gear, but, again, those conversions made financial sense. Sculptured Software's engineers were so versed at working on Super NES hardware that Peters says they were known as the Mode 7 company throughout the industry; they even built and sold development kits for the SNES to other studios. Like Acclaim, they saw no good reason to move backwards.
"My responsibility at that point wasn't just marketing titles," Holmes says. "I was the president and co-founder of Acclaim, so my job was to market Acclaim. That meant saying, 'Yes, we lost some money but we're continuing to grow and will be ahead of the market' as opposed to behind it. It would be difficult to declare your first loss and then say, 'Okay, let's start development of an 8-bit title.'"
The rise of ROM hacks, fan-made changes to games—and entirely new games recycled from official assets—act as a sort of fan fiction. There are 8-bit ports of many Mortal Kombat games for NES, even entries from the 3D era such as Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance. They're unofficial, but some play remarkably well, and they're as good as fans are ever going to get.
Above: One of many Mortal Kombat bootlegs.
Sources
· https://medium.com/the-peruser/a-brief-history-of-video-game-sales-49edbf831dc
· https://tedium.co/2015/07/16/sega-master-system-brazil/
· https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/acclaim-entertainment-inc/offset,225/so,1d/list-games/
This post is part of Kool Stuff, a companion book to Long Live Mortal Kombat: Round 1 that contains interviews I was unable to do before hitting Long Live MK’s deadline. Subscribe to Episodic Content to keep up with news on Long Live MK’s Kickstarter (set for March 22) and to follow along with Kool Stuff as new chapters are published.