Mortal kombat palette swap movie#

Mortal kombat palette swap movie#

We videotaped some moves, and talked about initial ideas and characters to add to his story - like, originally John had Japanese ninjas, but every movie in the 1980s and 1990s had Japanese ninjas, so I suggested Chinese ninjas called “ The Lin Kuei. Pesina: So after John called me we got my brother Carlos and Rich and snuck into the studio at like 10:30 at night to help John put together a pitch to Midway. Daniel will say, “Well, Tobias called us,” or he’ll say, “Tobias called me.” But I’m like, no, John called me. Rich Divizio, the actor who portrayed Kano: You’ll hear it different ways. I’d been doing martial arts my whole life, so he called me up and he’s like, “Hey, I have an idea for a fighting game, and I wanted to know if you can help me out to pitch an idea to my boss Ed Boon.” At the time, we thought it was going to be a small project, maybe 200 arcade cabinets. With the help of Tobias’ childhood friends, the developers leaned into the kung fu, magical realism storylines that became the selling point of Mortal Kombat.ĭaniel Pesina, the actor who portrayed Johnny Cage, Sub-Zero, Scorpion and Reptile: Before he worked for Midway, John Tobias and I used to do everything together. But Van Damme declined fellow co-creator John Tobias’ initial pitch for the mystical kung-fu game we know today. Mortal Kombat ’s co-creator and head of Midway, Ed Boon, wanted a “grittier version of Street Fighter II ” that would be focused on 1990s movie star Jean-Claude Van Damme. So Mortal Kombat should really be thought of as an underdog story, but a four-man development team with enough creative spark walked like a giant. There was a wall of Street Fighter II cabinets in the arcade well before Mortal Kombat showed up. Mike Haseloff, Mortal Kombat Online Webmaster : The definitive standard for modern fighting games had long been established in Street Fighter II. This was kind of a result of everything happening in the industry around them. So with the release of the Super Nintendo, things started to become a big problem for Midway, because they weren’t really sure what they were.Īlaimo: If you look at the games that Midway was releasing in the arcades in the late 1980s, aside from their pinball releases, you have a bunch of arcade cabinets that, while not totally unheard of, are certainly not A-list titles. Developers everywhere had to close up shop. You weren’t generally going to go out of your way to seek out arcade games when you had the NES at home.įarough: The industry was still struggling to get back on its feet after a big crash in the 1980s, where lots of people got really excited about video games and scrambled to make video games, but the market couldn’t support this glut of games.

By the early 1990s, it was still making pinball machines, and arcade cabinets like bowling games and shoot-out games.Ĭhris Alaimo, Gaming Historian : By 1992 or 1993, the gaming industry overall had been undergoing a slow transition out of the arcades and into the homes. The developer had no idea what would come next.Īmanda Farough, Managing Editor of Game Daily : Midway, as the developer that we came to know in the 1990s, wasn’t the developer that it originally started out as. In a small studio on the southwest side of Chicago, Midway began experimenting with digitized photographs in order to make a fighting game of its own. Midway Games was fresh off merging with Williams, a pinball machine company, when Capcom released Street Fighter II, helping make fighting games mainstream in the process.

But Mortal Kombat quickly became larger than life, thanks to a small group of friends who let their imaginations run wild, a marketing campaign of epic proportions, and of course, a couple spine-rips and nut punches that landed it in the Supreme Court. It was intended to be a small Street Fighter II clone with Jean-Claude Van Damme as its major selling point. If Mortal Kombat had followed its original trajectory, it would exist in a paltry 200 arcade cabinets, collecting dust in hipster arcade bars scattered across the Midwest.