A key period for the evolution of the fighting game, the early 90s marked the arrival of two pivotal franchises that still exist and flourish today: Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat. These are the titles that redefined the one-on-one beat 'em up and alongside SF2's cartoon stylings, Midway's digitised, violence-fuelled competitor captivated players with its memorable characters, surprisingly nuanced gameplay and buckets of blood. Highly innovative in many ways, it was put together relatively quickly by a development team of just four people.
Mortal Kombat started out as an experiment between friends John Tobias, Rich Divizio and Daniel Pesina. They filmed themselves performing martial arts moves with the idea of digitising them and putting into a game - an evolved approach to that taken by Atari with Pit-fighter two years earlier. Fellow Midway coder Ed Boon didn't think the initial pitch to Midway would work but did like the idea of a fighting game - suggesting that none other then Jean-Claude Van Damme should star in the title. Unfortunately, Van Damme declined the project forcing the team to rethink the concept and ironically, the actor would end up starring in the movie version of Street Fighter 2.
Work pressed ahead regardless, Boon joined the development effort, the digitisation technology was further refined and the game eventually shipped to arcades. It was a technologically advanced title for 1992, based on the Midway Y-Unit arcade board previously used in games including Smash TV and Total Carnage. Its impressive specs allowed the Y-Unit board to deliver large, high colour sprites and complex parallax background scrolling - high-end features that worked flawlessly in combination, outstripping the capabilities of the home consoles of the time.
from Eurogamer.net https://ift.tt/37R7TQ7
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