The Komplicated Story of Midway Games

and eleven. But the story of Midway is a really complicated one and it involves a lot of other companies

as well. And while the company that fizzled out in can technically trace its history back to arguably you could go even earlier, it wouldn't be fair to say that was really the same come monny, throughout all that time, plus, titles that Midway created are still going strong today years after the company has gone away, as there is a new Mortal Kombat movie preparing to finish up on the big or more likely for most of us, the slightly

less big screen. I figured that we could learn more about Midway, its history, it's influence on video games, the development of Mortal Kombat in particular, and While I could dive into excruciating detail, I'm not going to. This is going to be more of a summary than a full account,

because to go year by year would be tedious. Uh, Midway has been involved in tons of different coin operated amusements and then later on the home market, so we're gonna take kind of a very high level view, but it also means we're gonna have to look at a lot of other stuff. So along the way we will learn about coin operated our acade games and amusements, how the video game crash affected the arcade industry, and more. But our story begins well before there ever was a

Midway Games. We're actually going to look at a time that happened a century before Midway Games was founded. But don't worry, we're not again going to go into deep detail here. It is fascinating, but around the eighteen seventies, clever engineers figured out ways to make machines that could deliver some sort of product or service automatically in exchange for a coin. So a coin operated device, you might put a penny in a slot and then maybe a little ten figures like T I N ten figures begin

to race around a race track. Or jazz band might appear to dance around as music plays from the machine. By the way, if you're ever in San Francisco, I highly recommend you check out muse A Mechanique. It is a an entire museum dedicated to coin operated devices, ranging from games like pinball two very odd and specific implementations. It is a fascinating place and I love it very much.

Also kind of creepy. But the basic business model of this whole operation was that you have a company that builds these sorts of machines, right They specialize in creating

the clockwork or mechanics that actually do the thing. And then that company, once making this machine, would sell that machine to various business owners, and the owner might run a bar or maybe an amusement park or carnival or a bowling alley or whatever, and the owner would then recoup the cost of that purchase a penny or much

much later a quarter at a time. So as long as the machine was in good working order and people liked whatever it was the machine did, it would become a revenue generator and eventually turn a profit if you could run it for long enough. There's a great story of a sort of proto coin up device I want to talk about for a second. It came from the UK, specifically London, even more specifically Fleet Street, where a barber of some renown was known to cooperate with a local

pie shop owner. But that's a musical for another time. Anyway, there was a bookseller and political agitator named Richard Carlisle who had this weird idea that it wasn't totally fair that only about three percent of the UK's population actually had the right to vote. So he set up a bookseller shop on Fleet Street. And the authorities didn't really care for some of the literature he was selling, and they brought upon him charges that he was knowingly selling

prohibited books. Carlisle came up with what thought was a pretty clever workaround of this. He installed a shoot near the front of his shops. So there is a wall there and a little shoot a slot that was right there at the front, and there was also a coin slot and a dial next to the shoot, and customers

could come in. They could put a coin into the slot, and then they would turn the dial to a number that would correspond to a specific title of a book that would otherwise prohibited, and then the respective literature would come down the shoot and the customer would pick it up and walk away. Now, the only reason this doesn't actually fall into a true coin op is that behind the scenes there was no automatic vending system. Carlisle had

employees who were behind that wall. They could see what number of the dial was set to and then they would select the appropriate piece of literature and slide it down the shoote by hand. And carl Le wasn't trying to fool anyone into thinking the was an automatic system. He just wanted plausible deniability. If the fuzz came by, then Carlisle could claim that the customer would be unable to say who it was that sold them the book

because whomever it was was behind a wall. Reportedly, this defense wasn't really impressive to the coppers and not found to be legally sound, but by the eighteen seventies the basics of coin operation and automation had really taken shape. Penny arcades would then become a thing, and they were extremely popular from the eighteen nineties into the first few

years of the twentieth century. So these were areas that were specifically set aside to hold different amusements that were operated by the insertion of a penny, and then you would get to do whatever it was like. It might be a game, or it might even be sort of like a little movie. There were these devices called muto scopes. They did not mutate people. Rather, they were kind of a predecessor to motion pictures, and they allowed people to

watch short, silent movies. It was really a series of photographs. I mean all movies are really those, a series of photographs that were mounted on stiff cards that were then in turn mounted on a round drum. So the machine, once you put a pinnion, would rotate the drum and that would present these photographs in series at a speed fast enough to create the illusion of animation. Many of

these early devices were of a rather salacious nature. They featured movies of young women cavorting in various stages of undress, and each device was dedicated to a specific film, sometimes with incredibly evocative titles like what the Butler Saw. This also meant that the industry in general of the coin op world was starting to get a bad name for itself. Uh. A lot of the people behind it also abandoned it because they started to get into the actual motion picture industry.

So for a couple of different reasons, the penny arcades began to have a bit of a decline in popularity, and they definitely had a stigma attached to them. I mean, the fact that you had these little, you know, movie machines showing off women partially undressed, meant that they were

essentially associated with a certain clientele of low repute. And the next big advantage in coin operated amusements fell into the gambling category, with like the early versions of slot machines, and that further associated coin operated devices with the more seedy elements of society. First you had peep shows, now you got gambling. Such stuff attracts the wrong crowd, you know, like hoodlums and gangsters and hop heads and whatnot, or so thought the various guardians of virtue, many of whom

were self appointed. Meanwhile, some inventors were creating devices that introduced games of skill rather than just games of chance. So in other words, it was something where the person putting in the coin actually had a chance to to change the outcome in some way, as opposed to just hoping that dumb chance makes a ball fall into a

particular pocket or something. But the association with stuff like gambling and peep shows clung to these devices too, and they were all kind of lumped into uh machines that were guaranteed to send the country into moral decline. Then we get into pinball, which similarly had to deal with the problem that citizens of unimpeachable morality were sure that pinball machines would lead the innocent youth astray and perhaps serve as a front for organized crime. Serious of y'all.

And there were tons of other coin operated amusements, some of which simulated various sports. So you could play a sort of game of baseball or tennis on this mechanical device. It was coin operated, and you would control these little figures using different handles and wheels and other types of you know, input devices. And and they were also early pellet gun based games and later light gun based games,

so they were shooting games as well. Meanwhile, mass production had also become a thing, with assembly lines and efficient methods of making a lot of versions of the same product. That led us to the birth of several companies that started to specialize in coin operated entertainment. One of those companies was Lynn Durance United manufacturing company, which would end

up being incredibly important for our story. It first burst onto the scene in ninety two, but its first really big hit was in had a bowling game called Shuffle Alley. The game had these little cutouts that represented bowling pins. They were suspended from hinged poles. So you would slide a puck like device down the alley, uh, which really is going kind of underneath where the pins are. But as it goes down the alley, it would trigger these

little switches that corresponded to those suspended pins. So as the puck would trigger the switch, those poles would flip up and retract the pins, which represented that they had been knocked down, like in a game of bowling. And it was a really big hit. But more importantly, United employed a couple of amusement designers who are critical to our story. One was Marcine Iggy Wolverton. He went by Iggy. I felt that Marcine was a uh an effeminate name that he didn't want, and so he went with Iggy.

And he was an engineer who had worked on everything from military aircraft in World War Two two juke boxes before he actually joined United. The other was an electrical engineer named Hank Ross, and together Wolverton and Ross worked on lots of different amusements coin operated amusements, but in the nineteen fifties, United was going through some financial difficulties and Wolverton and Ross decided that they wanted to strike

out and found their own company. They did so in Franklin Park, Illinois, and they named their company after the nearby airport in Chicago. They called it the Midway Manufacturing Company, and it officially became a thing in nineteen fifty eight. Funding coincidence, the Midway is also the name for the area in a carnival that hosts stuff like games and amusement rides, so in this case the name of the

company had a sort of double meaning. Anyway, the two men founded the company with a startup fund of just around five thousand dollars, and they knew that they wouldn't be able to compete on the same scale as the larger, more established companies in the business, most of them located out of Chicago, so their plan was to keep costs low so that they could sell their games and their

amusements for lower prices than other companies. The margins would be small it would be hard work, but they figured they could carve out a place in the market for themselves. That way, they might not get rich, but they thought they could make some interesting games and devices and earn a good living. Their first game was called Bumper Shuffle, a sort of shuffle board game with bumpers similar to what you would see in a pinball machine. But their first big hit came out in nineteen sixty It was

Shooting Gallery, and it used a pellet gun. It was such a hit that shooting games became a cornerstone of their business. They also kept innovating. In nineteen sixty four, they created a system in which the machine would automatically speed up the moving targets as players scored more points, so, in other words, the game got more difficult if you were good at it kept the game interesting for like

highly skilled players. They also introduced targets that were covered in fluorescent paint, and they started to use black lights and some of their games, and both of those innovations would find their ways into shooting games moving forward. Before long, the demand was high enough that it required them to move to a larger building to house their operations. In nineteen sixty six, Midway, the company that was going to be a scrappy little underdog had become an overdog, or

maybe just a dog whatever I mean. It got big, big enough to stand toe to toe with the four other big coin operated companies in the United States GOTTLIEB Williams, Bally, and Chicago Coin and spoiler alert. Two of those four are going to be incredibly important to our story. And let's go ahead and get this one of those. In nineteen sixty nine, there would be a big change in the industry. That was the year that Bally bought out

Midway Manufacturing. Bally was known not just for coin operated amusements, but specifically for gambling devices, though it had made its name early on with pinball machines. And if you listen to the whose song Pinball Wizard, you'll hear the lyric I thought I was the Bally table King, but I just handed my pinball crown to him. So yeah. Bally also very much associated with pinball machines as well as gambling machines. Bally itself had nearly collapsed in nineteen fifty eight,

that was the same year the Midway was founded. That was when Bally's founder had passed away. A group of investors, however, came in and purchased Bally's and the company went on to produce updated slot machines kind of similar to the ones that you might find in a casino today, of the classic type, that is, and Bally had a near monopoly on slot machines and casinos in Nevada and became financially stable, in fact, flourishing enough to acquire Midway Manufacturing

in nineteen sixty nine. So at this time, the Midway division was still making electro mechanical arcade devices. But in the early nineteen seventies things changed. The birth of the video game opened up new possibilities. You could make a game that ran on code instead of on servos and actuators and lightbulbs. You could reduce the number of possible fail points, and that would reduce how much maintenance you would have to perform on machines, and so Midway's focus

began to include video games. Early on, Midway established a couple of incredibly important partnerships with Japanese companies. The first was with Tito, which produced the phenomenally popular Space Invaders video game. At the end of the nineteen seventies. Midway would also become the North American distributor of Space Invaders, and that got that company a lot of money. The second big partnership was with Namco. That's the company that

brought us pac Man. So Midway introduced these games two Americans who went gaga for them, and Midway, Tito, and Namco all benefited from this relationship. Around this time, Valley merged its own games division with Midway, creating Bally Midway. Previously, both divisions had been making games like pinball machines on their own. Now their forces were combined and they moved forward, with Bally usually using its own name for the pinball

machines and using Midway for the arcade video machines. Midway would also jump on some other opportunities. When a company called General Computer Corporation created a modified version of pac Man, Midway agreed to act as distributor, and through collaboration, this game evolved into MS pac Man. It was fairly late into that project when Midway actually bothered to seek out the blessing of Namco that's the producer of the original

pac Man game. They were able to get it, obviously, but they also had to agree to pay out royalties to Namco for leaning so hard on the I P And that only makes sense. So you had engineers, developers, artists, and such working on games under the Bally Midway label. When we come back, we're going to switch gears and talk about a totally different company. But don't worry, it all comes back together as we head toward Mortal Combat. Okay, I'm gonna take a break now, all right, it's time

for us to backtrack a little bit. You might remember before the break that when I listed out the big coin op companies that emerged from the nineteen fifties, one of them was called Williams, which also grew out of Chicago. Now, remember when I mentioned United Manufacturing, that was the company

founded by Lynn Durant. Well, technically there was a co founder to that company, Harry Williams, And that means you can actually trace the history of both Midway and Williams to this one company that produced coin op entertainments way back in the nineteen forties. Harry Williams actually left United after only a year of being with the company, and then he formed his own Williams Manufacturing company in nineteen forty three, Williams had already made a ton of contributions

to the development of games like pinball. He had actually introduced elements like the tilt detector, which can tell if someone's trying to nudge or tilt a pinball table in order to control where the ball is going. If that happens, they tilt detector shuts everything down and allows the ball to drain. It's kind of a punishment for people who are trying to cheat the game. He also introduced the

concept of a free play. If a player achieved a sufficiently high score on a game, the Williams Manufacturing company would have a pretty wild ride of its own. I guess it's a good thing there wasn't a sensor in the company for tilt, because it would have gone off

numerous times. In ninety eight, Sam Stern would buy to the company, taking up almost half of the ownership Williams is Harry Williams focused on developing games, while Sam Stern kind of handled most of the business side of the enterprise. In nineteen fifty nine, a conglomerate out of New York called Consolidated sun Ray bought out Harry Williams share of the company and it became the Williams Electronic Manufacturing Corporation.

Harry Williams essentially left the company at this point, though he did occasionally design games for Williams in the following years. In nineteen sixty one, sam Stern then purchased the shares that were owned by Consolidated sun Ray, but in sixty four he sold the company to another corporation called ce Berg, which also acquired the old Union Manufacturing. So yeah, I'm

getting kind of dizzy too. The operations transferred over to a factory that had been owned by Union, and the entire company adopted the Williams brand name, becoming Williams Electronics. Sam Stern was actually brought back in to run the operations that were overseeing the coin op amusements like Bally and Midway. The folks that Williams understood the potential for video games as those came onto the scene, and so the company started to work on developing arcade video games

in the early nineteen seventies. This coincided with a restructuring of the company, and in nineteen seventy four we got Williams Electronics Incorporated, which was still a subsidiary to see Berg at that point. But in nineteen eighty a guy named Louis Nicastro purchased Williams Electronics from Seaberg. It was this version of Williams that would introduce the world to some incredibly popular arcade titles like Joust Defender and Robotron.

Classic arcade game nerds will be familiar with those titles, which sucked down quarters at an incredible pace. Now, a related area of revenue was the blossoming home video game market. That one one was ramping up quite a bit, in fact, a bit too fast, as would turn out. Usually, companies like Midway or Williams wouldn't develop games for home systems. Instead, they would license out their i p to other game studios, which would then create home versions of those arcade games.

The home versions were often, at best pale imitations of the original arcade game experience, and there were a couple of big reasons for this. Some of them are technological, some of them are more related to gameplay, and let's go with technological first. From that perspective, early game consoles had a really limited amount of processing power. Moreover, I am really talking about consoles that could play different games, typically by inserting a cartridge into the video game console.

The games were hard coded into the circuitry inside those cartridges, and plugging the cartridge into the console connected the game's circuit board to the consoles processors. Arcade games were instead dedicated machines that just did one thing. They played a specific game based on whatever wrong chips that is, read only memory chips were plugged into the circuit boards for

that arcade cabinet. Arcade games provided a more sophisticated experience than the home game market, even when the experience was still fairly primitive early on. You would never say that the Atari twenty version of pac Man was identical to the arcade version, because it clearly was not. In fact, it was pretty awful. But from a gameplay perspective, there was another big difference. Let's talk about why arcade game

designers made games the way they were. So. The whole point is to convince someone to plunk over a quarter. In order to play a game, the game has to be interesting and more importantly, arguably fun. It needs to give the player the sense that if they are skilled enough, they can progress further into the game, perhaps even getting a high score or finishing out of storyline depending on how the game is constructed. But that's just one side

to it. The machines have to make enough money to convince proprietors, that is, the people who own a video game, arcade or a carnival or whatever. It has to convince them that they will recoup their investment after they purchase the arcade game. And if a machine costs a couple of thousand dollars, the proprietors want to know that at the end of a week they'll have a few hundred bucks in quarters. And this is really important because games

might pass out of fashion. That means over time you're gonna expect to see smaller takes at the end of a week, So you need a lot of quarters. Well

how do you get a lot of quarters? Well, part of it is that you have to make a game that people want to play, But another part is figuring out a kind of an amount of time that the average person might play before they run out of lives and thus require the player to either cough up another quarter to start over or to continue to play, or they'll move on and open up the arcade machine for

some other player to come and try it out. That amount of time has changed over the years, like the amount of time that developers aimed for, but at one point, the general rule of thumb was that a company wanted a player to plunk in another twenty five cents every forty five seconds or so, so less than a minute. So your game had to convince a player to keep ongoing and reward that player with the possibility of hitting

new heights or getting further in the story. If it didn't, people would just give up after getting obliterated, and then they would talk about it, and word would get around, and then that game might sit in the corner unplayed, and the proprietor of that establishment, whether it was an arcade or a movie theater or whatever, might not be inclined to purchase an arcade machine from that same company

in the future because they got burned. So the reputation of the companies was dependent upon the fact that people would want to play the game and be willing to keep plugging quarters in over time. So companies like Williams and Midway would frequently deploy a game under development at a couple of controlled spots in town before they would

go into full production. They would install the game into like an arcade that they kind of they had friends who ran it, and they would keep it high on players to see how much money that arcade machine would bring in by the end of a week, to figure out if they were on the right track or if they might have to make changes before they go into production.

A target figure was between seven eight hundred dollars in a week by the time you get to the late eighties and early nineties, So this was different from the home market. At the home market, you wanted a game that people wanted to play, and it wasn't so important that the game experience only last a few seconds because you only sell that cartridge once. You're not collecting over time. I mean, you can actually compare arcade games to micro transactions and mobile games in a lot of ways, but

with home games, it was very different. You sold the cartridge, you're done, So the game developers were more concentrated on making experiences that players really enjoyed, that they could play for a while, because that would be reflected in reviews for the game, which then could help drive sales. So very different approach to video game development from the arcade versus the home market. All right back to arcade games, because those games were programmed onto wrong chips, making changes

was a pretty big deal. You were actually creating new hardware, new rong chips in order to do it. So in some cases the arcade machines circuit board might allow for easy swapping of ROM chips or adding a new wrong chip, but in others it would mean having to create new circuit boards with the games physically programmed onto these chips

and then redeployed for testing. If a company couldn't demonstrate that their game was going to be popular, it would be very hard to move units, and the process of developing producing arcade games wasn't cheap, so there was a lot of pressure to make games that could have a proven success rate. All right, let's get back to our story.

So Bally Midway was making a lot of arcade games, including a ton of you know, games that were licensed from other gamemakers in Japan, so they were really distributing those, not making them. Some of those games, though, were truly iconic. Spy Hunter remains one of my favorite arcade games from my childhood, particularly the versions that were in a cockpit style.

Cabinet Tapper was a really big hit that featured the player taking control of a bartender serving up drinks root beer in a lot of family friendly locations, and you're serving them to various patrons who are moving slowly across the screen down a bar, and you're trying to keep them from getting to the end and throwing you out. Tron and Discs of Tron were two licensed arcade games based off the Tron motion picture and I loved both

of those games. And then there were the games from Japan that Bally Midway distributed here in America, like pac Man and Galagha and Galaxion. Midway also created Rampage, a game in which players took control of one of three giant monsters going on a a rampage through various cities. That game was developed by Brian Collen and Jeff Nauman, who set out to make a cartoonish fun game at

which there was no specific set way to play. You just had fun smashing stuff up while puny humans tried to stop you, and if you took enough damage, your game was over. But it was a big success for Bally Midway. Williams meanwhile, was struggling a bit in the arcade game department. It's arcade video game division was effectively shuttered after the home video game market crash of the

early eighties. They had encountered difficulty getting their units sold into different arcades, so they kind of put it on the back burner. The overall company had cash, but it was finding it difficult to get traction in the video game market again, so Williams acquired Bally Midway from Bally Proper, the parent company. Bally was getting out of the coin op entertainment arcade business, focusing on other stuff like gambling machines and the like. According to the documentary Insert Coin,

the acquisition was just for five million dollars. Williams would get the rights to the Bally Midway name for arcade machines and pinball machines that sort of thing, and they would continue to release pinball machines branded under Bally because of how well known that brand was in pinball. But this meant that Williams, Bally, and Midway we're all the same company, at least when it came to coin operated entertainment devices, and Williams even changed its name to Midway

effectively for video games. Uh, and they relocated Midway operations to Chicago in the process. The Midway name had a stronger presence in the arcade world, but Williams still used its own name for pinball machine. So it gets really confusing. And now all the folks who had been working on Williams games became Midway game designers, which they kind of resented. As for the folks from Midway, the teams that were working on coin operated devices, most of them did not

go with this acquisition. A lot of those designers quit. There's a famous photograph, the Waiving Goodbye photograph, where they're not really waving goodbye, they're holding up a single digit each a very rude gesture. I think you can see where I'm going anyway. Well, two of the designers actually did make the move over to Williams, that being and Colon and Jeff Nouman, the guys who made Rampage. They

came over to Williams now Midway. But some of the managers, also from the old Valley Midway days, made their way over to Williams as well. So now you had Williams designers who were reporting to Midway managers. And so the Midway of the late eighties and early nineties was really a mishmash of Williams employees, Midway managers, and some folks who had come up from the older coin not days. One of the people working in the pinball division at

Williams was a man named Ed Boone. Heck Boon made a contribution to one of my favorite pinball games of all time. It's a pinball game called fun House. In that game, there is an element on the playing field, a ventriloquist dummy head named Rudy, and Rudy heckel's you as you play. Rudy has a moving mouth and his head's right there on the playfield, and with the right timing and angle, you could shoot the pinball right into his mouth make him cough. It was fun anyway. Boone

was the voice for Rudy. Midway also added a few new developers and artists to its roster that would shape the evolution of video games and caused quite a bit of controversy in the process. One of those was Mark Termel, who had designed games for Activision back in the early eighties. He joined Williams Slash Midway in nine and got to work on a game called Smash TV. The control system was a pair of joysticks inspired by the classic arcade

game Robotron. One joystick controlled character movement and the other controlled which direction you were firing in the game had a cheeky sense of humor, styled as a violent game show. In the vein of Running Man, players would go through a maze of room after room that would become flooded with enemies and pickups or the occasional boss fight, and you weren't likely to survive for too long, which meant

players would keep feeding quarters into the machine. The game promised players that if they got to the end, they would be awarded with a run in the Pleasure Dome, but turned out that this was originally an empty promise because there was no pleasure dome in the original game. I think that just makes it more in line with

properties like Running Man Now. It turned out that some players were complaining about this, so Turmel actually created an updated wrong chip that could be installed into Smash TV cabinets to include the pleasure Dome, which was a room filled with an icon of a woman in a swimsuit, like just a whole bunch of this icons of the same woman, which then you could collect like coins or cash, which is kind of gross. So maybe a tiny bit

of a downer there. But one of the artists who worked on Termel's Smash TV was a guy named John Tobias. He had joined Williams in the late eades and decided to work on art in the video game industry. He had graduated from art school and this is what he wanted to do. So when we come back, we'll find out how Smash TV and the meeting of Tobias and Boone would lead to the development of Mortal Kombat. But

first let's take another break. So Smash TV and another earlier Williams game called Narc helped set the stage for Mortal Kombat. Both of those games featured over the top violence. Narc also made use of actors. Williams The company would bring in actors and film them against a backdrop doing stuff like, you know, just walking on a treadmill or other simple actions, and the team would take that footage to create in game animation and make it more realistic.

The company began to develop a small video unit dedicated to getting the sort of reference material which would later be used to create digitized content for games like Mortal Kombat and NBA JAM. Narc caught a lot of flak for being an incredibly violent game. In it, you played as one of two characters who had great names. There

was Max Force and there was hit Man. These two characters progressed through levels, taking out various drug dealers and junkies with what can only be described as extreme prejudice. Both characters had rocket launchers and machine guns, downed enemies, practically exploded in blood and limbs, but the whole thing was still kind of cartoony, so it was violent but not realistic, so cartoony and violent. That was enough to get a lot of concerned parental types upset at the game.

But the company Midway, kind of corded this attention because the publicity just drove up interest in the games, and so Midway was able to sell more cabinets to arcades and movie theaters and the like because customers really wanted to play this controversial game. So for them it was a good thing. They were not upset being called UH and criticized for violence. It just made them more money.

So they started to have this uh, this culture change over at Midway, one that started to embrace over the top violence and gore, and that set the stage for John Tobias and ed Boon to pitch their own game, though they did not intend for it to be a super gory game when they first set out, and it all really came about because there was going to be a production gap in the in the actual manufacturing facilities that were coming up in like six months, So Midway

had to take production runs into consideration when it was rolling out games, because it's one thing to design and program a game, it's another to produce thousands of copies of that game. Particular early when you remember you're talking about arcade machines, these are big, heavy things with monitors and circuit boards and meters and meters of wiring in them. So in this case, the company had a gap of

three months between production runs. One game was going to come to the end of its production run, the next game wasn't going to be ready for another three months, so Boone and Tobias were essentially given the chance to develop a fighting game that would fit in that gap. To the executives at Midway, this was a no brainer. The manufacturing line was going to be idle, and so it was better to have a potential revenue generator going

into production than to do nothing at all. But half a year is a very short time to design a game. The original idea was to create a fighting game based on Geenclaude Van Dem, the martial artist and actor. Van Dam, however, passed on the pitch, which freed up Boone and Tobias to come up with their own characters and designs. They added John Vogel and Dan Ford in to their team to help in the development, with Ford and really focusing on sound design. Tobias called up a friend he knew

from childhood, Daniel Posina. Pasina was into martial arts, and Tobias wanted Possina to come in and be part of the team and allow them to get some video footage of Possina doing stuff like walking, kicking, punching, falling down, and this footage would be digitized, so Mortal Kombat was to be a fighting game in which the figures were

actual people rather than animated cartoon characters. Passina would go on to portray not just Johnny Cage, who is in the game a martial arts action star clearly inspired by Van Down, but he also played the ninja characters Scorpion and sub Zero in those early video capture sessions to Bias and Boone had to tell Passina to move more

slowly than he normally would. Passina, being trained in martial arts, naturally would throw punches and kicks much faster than the studio camera was able to handle because the resulting footage would end up being really blurry, so he had to do everything at a more methodical pace. However, this proved

to be difficult for a certain moves. At one such move in Moral Kombat sees Johnny Cage do this flying kick which can go a pretty good distance, but turns out it's really hard to jump and hover in mid air, and so the solution was to use various surfaces, like a portable set of steps, so that the actors could make a pose and hold it in mid air being supported by this stuff, and then that would all be removed once the video game was going into production, and

you're just left with the digitized image of someone doing this incredible kick that just suspends in mid air. Boone and Tobias put together an early version of the fighting game something to show off to the executives at midway to kind of give up progress. Update. It wasn't the

full game didn't have the full roster of characters. A lot of stuff that would make it into the final version wasn't included yet, but what they showed off impressed the executives so much that they decided to make a drastic change rather than have the game be a gap filler from midway, something that was just thrown together without much thought or effort at at the management level. At least now it was going to become a fully fleshed

out project. The development team got more resources so they could put more into it, and now the game that would become Mortal Kombat would no longer be rushed through to production midway. Since that they had a real money maker on their hands. Boone and Tobias brought in more actors, creating more characters, fleshing out their back stories a bit. Each character had his or her own reason for being

in this tournament. They created the conflict between the Earth Realm, which was a version of our reality, and the out world, where a lot of batties lived. The lore has since been fleshed out much much further, and I don't even want to go into it because this would turn into a fan cast about Moral Kombat. Plus I'd have to try and make sense of some of the contradictions that have popped up in the storyline as more versions of

the game have come out. During the development process, the team gradually began to make the game more violent and more graphic. According to Tobias and Boone, this was never part of the original idea just came about as the team began to incorporate more fanciful and magical elements into the game. So sub Zero got ice powers, Scorpion had his famous harpoon on a rope, lu Kane could shoot fireballs from his hands, and so on. And then the team also decided to mock a common practice a common

mechanic in fighting games at the time. So a lot of fighting games incorporate a dizzy ing or stunning effect, meaning that when your character gets hit by a powerful move or you end up on the receiving end of a few moves, you get stunned and you can't respond. That gives your opponent the chance to land additional hits on you can't really do anything about it. Boon and Tobias were not big fans of this, but they decided to incorporate it in a different way. Instead of happening

in the middle of a match. They decided that at the deciding match, because moral comments set up to be a best two out of three per match between two fighters, at the deciding match, the losing character would be stunned at the end, and this was mostly just an excuse for the winning player to be able to land a big upper cut on the loser, and the upper cut always resulted in an exaggerated move that would throw the opponent up into the air and that would be the

final blow. But that led the team to consider alternatives that they could do. Instead of just letting you do a big upper cut or kick or whatever. What if they hid a few really over the top moves that could be pulled off at the end of a match. Players would have to execute a series of joystick moves and button presses to pull off these maneuvers. They would be finishers or fatalities that would show one character killing

another on screen. They did this sort of for fun and initially got a very shocked reaction from within the company and the actors portraying the characters. They kept saying, we can't do this, and the developer said, why can't we do it? No one ever comes in to check on us, I think we're okay, And sure enough people thought about it, and soon dollar signs were kind of appearing all over the place, and they thought this could be a really big part of the experience of playing

the game. Players could discover the correct combinations and then show off to friends who would go ape at seeing one character rip the heart out of another or decapitating them with an uppercut or whatever. So it went into the game. In the end, Mortal Kombat would be a violent, bloody and cheeky game. It didn't take itself too seriously, and when the company tested out the game and its locations around Chicago, it was immediately clear they had produced

a huge hit. Orders poured in for the game. More than twenty five thousand units were sold. Players were going crazy finding out how to pull off fatalities, and the game's practice of loser pays, winner stays was really popular too, meaning if you were facing off against another human player and you won, you got to keep playing, but if you lost, then you had to put in another coin

or make way for the next person. This encouraged people to line their quarters or tokens up on the arcade machine in order to call next, and you had lines of challengers forming to play against the current local hot shot. The arcade machine just kept collecting coins, so it was a really effective product for Midway. It was a huge success. Now we've been going for a while and I've got a lot more to say about Mortal Kombat and Midway.

I want to talk more about how the game progressed and changed over the years, the pressures that the developers found themselves under and things that that led to them deciding to try something different, as well as the demise of Midway and the continuing success of Mortal Kombat. But all of that's gonna have to wait for another episode, So tune in later this week for part two of this and we will pick up to talk about the consequences,

perhaps with a k of Mortal Kombat coming out. If you have suggestions for topics I should tackle in future episodes of tech Stuff, let me know on Twitter where our handle is text Stuff hs W, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H