The Mortal Kombat Konquest

of a company called Midway. That was a company that was really a mishmash of several other companies that all were in the coin operated amusement biz at elements of Midway Manufacturing, Williams Electronics, and Bally all wrapped up in there. It's pretty complicated stuff. The two leads in charge of developing Mortal Kombat were Williams employees, but then Williams acquired Midway and changed the name of that division of Williams

to Midway Games. And though they didn't necessarily set out to make a video game with over the top violence and even more over the top fatalities, that game naturally evolved in that direction as they developed it and Mortal Kombat hit the arcades. In I didn't really talk about the structure of the game and how it worked from a gameplay aspect very much in that last episode, So

I'm going to give a very brief overview here. Mortal Kombat is modeled after fight tournaments, and really it's a lot like fight tournament movies more than actual fight tournaments, specifically the sort of gen Claude van Damn variety of you know, martial arts tournament films. Players choose one of seven characters, and then they go through a series of matches,

each match lasting up to three rounds. Winning two of those three rounds would allow the player to progress further up the tournament ladder, and winning two rounds in a road just means that you wouldn't even have to play through the third round. The controls for the game included an eight direction joystick and five buttons. There were two punch buttons high and low, to kick buttons also high

and low, and in the middle a block button. Each character had numerous moves that would result from joystick and button combinations, and the fatalities at the end of a game where you had defeated your opponent, and one year, two out of three those relied on specific inputs of joystick and button combinations, So, for example, Scorpions fatality and Mortal Kombat one was you had to start about half a screen away from your opponent, hold the block button

and then push up on the joystick twice. Then Scorpion would pull off his mask, revealing a skull and breathe fire out onto his opponent, reducing that person to a skeleton. Now, if you were playing the tournament against the actual arcade machine, so you know a computer is controlling the second character, then a second player could come up and actually interrupt things.

So player number two walks up, plunks in some quarters and then joining in, and that would mean the first player would enter into a new match against the second player, and whoever won that contest, you know, contest with a K, would then proceed through the tournament. So if the first player lost, then they would be out of luck and the second player could continue to play against the machine,

or maybe someone else comes up and challenges them. Like I said in the last episode, you know, the loser pays, the winner stays. If a player gets through the other six characters in tournament mode, then they face a doppel ganger of their own character, and after that, the player has to win three endurance matches, which they face two opponents per match instead of just one, though they don't

face both opponents at the same time. Essentially, you have to defeat your first opponent, which and triggers the entrance of the second opponent, and if you succeed in doing that, then you would go up against a sub boss in the game named Goro, who is a massive foe armed monster who deals enormous amounts of damage, and if you beat Goro, then you go up against the ultimate boss in the game, Sheng Sung, and defeating Shank Sung leads to an end screen that explains your character's fate after

winning the Mortal Kombat tournament, and that's where some of the early lore came in. You had intro screens as well in attract mode. Attract mode is what the arcade Biz called the screens that games would show in order to kind of entice people to come in and play the game anyway. Those would explain who the characters were, and then you had your victory screens that gave a little more information about them, but at the time it

was pretty threadbare. Future chapters in the Mortal Kombat saga would give a lot more background, as would a lot of additional material provided by stuff like comic books and movies, and sometimes this would end up having contradictory information, so the lore does not always stay in line throughout the entire series. For fighting games, I'm not sure you need that much background. But then Mortal Kombat has obviously extended well beyond just the games. We'll talk about that more

in a little bit. Mortal Kombat spawned countless imitators, as well as inspired game developers from other companies to make similarly violent games. Not just fighting games, but other styles of games too. Started to get more violent and more graphic and gory. While in the golden age of arcades, games were kind of more abstract and fanciful. Uh not necessarily better, They just, you know, they couldn't be graphic because we just didn't have the technology to do it.

But there was a shift towards more violent and gory games upon the success of More Combat. Not that we suddenly saw all other types of games just disappear, but the trend certainly favored violence and over the top gore. While some media coverage took midway to task for releasing such a violent game, criticism didn't really pick up until the title made its way to home systems, ported to

the Nintendo and Sega game systems of the time. Nintendo's version infamously removed all the blood, replacing it with gray fluid. That was I guess sweat. Sega's system if you entered a code at the beginning of the game, kept all that blood in so you can actually enact the the blood mode in Mortal Kombat. And that was actually part of Sega's campaign, saying that Sega does what Nintendo don't

cute right. Those home games got the attention of various parental groups and politicians, and there followed a great debate about video games and their role in corrupting the youth. Won't somebody please think of the children? This was extremely similar, one might even say identical to previous waves of parental concern about such societal threats as rock and or roll music,

Dungeons and Dragons, and violent movies or TV shows. To this day, studies show no correlation between violent video games and violent behavior, and suggest that perhaps people who are prone to violent outbursts may also like violent video games, but that violent video games don't necessarily make people prone to violent outbursts. So, in other words, maybe there's some sort of relationship here, but there doesn't appear to be any causation, and the correlation kind of goes in the

opposite direction that these groups seem to believe. In other words, it's not that violent games make violent people, but that violent people might like violent games. The home release of Mortal Kombat was one of the events that precipitated the creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board or e s RB. The concern about video game violence and its influence on young, impressionable minds went all the way up to US Congress

in and ninety four. In these hearings, which were pretty difficult to listen to, it became clear that Congress was getting ready to wade into the world of video games and potentially start censoring stuff unless the industry guides act

together and took care of things itself. The response from the industry was the e s r B, which would have a uniform system to assign ratings to games, which would give parents an indication of what sort of content the games contained and an estimation of the appropriate age of player. So, in other words, you would come across a game in a store, there would be a label on it and it would tell you, oh, this game

is not appropriate for young players. For people under the age of say, thirteen, so I shouldn't give this to you know, a little timmy. And just as a side note on this Congress up, it's full of old people, like really old people. There are a few younger people in Congress too, but not many. And I say this as someone who is admittedly a rapidly aging person, and old people have trouble keeping up with the way trends change. To the old people, video games were just things for

little kids. They were toys. It didn't occur to most of these old people that the young folks who grew up with video games in the early eighties were still playing video games on more recent systems by the mid nineties, and that this meant the young kids were now young adults. So to the old people, it was all like five and six year olds that were playing Mortal Kombat and learning that if you take off your mask you can incinerate someone and leave a scorched skeleton in their place.

Because remember we're talking about realistic violence here. Okay, I might be getting a little snarky. I would say that there was probably a knowledge gap for parents, so a rating system wasn't a bad idea. Necessarily, many parents are also rapidly aging people and maybe are unaware that video games had sort of changed from the days when you

were a yellow disc eating dots and avoiding ghosts. So a rating system that would let parents know, hey, this game might not be right for little Timmy who is five. That wasn't necessarily a bad idea, though I would argue that if you have a game titled Mortal Kombat and the game box shows people fighting each other, then that might already be a bit of an indicator. But what

the heck do I know? Anyway, the moral panic fed into the creation of the e s RB, and the industry would assign ratings to keep the government out of regulating the video game industry. As long as they did it, the government would need to. For Midway, this was really all great publicity. The company wasn't actually in the business of making home video games right now. In fact, it

wasn't responsible for those home ports. It was still firmly in the coin operated arcade game business, so it licensed out its titles to other developers, who then went on to make the home console versions of the Midway titles. But Midway itself was still firmly in the business of taking people's money one quarter at a time, or you know, sometimes two quarters. Mortal Kombat had sort of gained this

reputation for being edgy, and that helped push sales. Arcade owners and you know, other proprietors who had purchased arcade cabinets. We're pretty happy because the games were popular and it was possible to recoup the investment of purchasing an arcade machine within a few weeks. Meanwhile, back at Midway, the plan was to build on success. The Mortal Kombat team began working on a sequel pretty much right away after the release of the first game. In Midway released other

games too, not just Mortal Kombat. One of the big ones was NBA jam in nine. That game featured two on two basketball games with digitized images of players from the NBA officially licensed for the arcade game. The team used images of various players grabbing pictures of their heads looking in directions like up, down, left, right, and diagonal up,

diagonal down, that kind of stuff. The digitized heads were plopped onto, you know, kind of cartoonish bodies, and the game featured over the top action, enthusiastic commentary from a voice actor and a lot of fast paced action on the screen. It also incorporated rubber banding, meaning that if you were playing against the computer and you were starting to get ahead, then that computer would start to make your shots miss and your opponents would start to hit

their shots. Likewise, if you were falling way behind, well and suddenly the computer controlled team wouldn't make as many shots and you would be able to catch up. So the goal from the games perspective was to keep those games close and exciting, and also to keep convincing players to plunk in quarters to continue the game to completion. But it did feel a little bit like cheating. There was also some legit chicanery going on with the game.

The dominant team at the time were the Chicago Bulls, represented in NBA Jam by Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant. But a big rival to the Chicago Bulls were the Detroit Pistons, and it turned out that Mark Termel you remember from the previous episode that he came into William's Slash midway and began work on Smash TV. Well, anyway, while he was working on NBA Jam, he decided, as a big Detroit Pistons fan, that he was going to

change the odds a little bit. So if you happen to be playing the Pistons against the Bulls, you would see that the Bulls players tend to miss shots at a critical point in the game, like if it's a buzzer beating type of shot, they miss, Whereas if you're playing the Pistons and you make a buzzer beating shot that would win you the game, you hit it and

take that Chicago Bowls. Originally, Midway wanted to put a bunch of special characters in NBA Jam, including Mortal Kombat characters, a sort of Easter eggs, but the NBA objected to that idea, so only a few special characters actually made it into that first game, and they were all Midway employees like John Carlton and Tony Gotsky, and you know, Mortal Kombat was a big hit for Midway, but NBA

Jam blew the doors off it. Midway got a call early on when they were testing NBA Jam in a few locations around Chicago, and the call said that the game was broken, which was a huge issue. I mean, obviously, if something is wrong with the game, the team would have to come up with a fix before the game goes into full production or else they're going to be sending out, you know, replacement chips to potentially thousands of different proprietors. So the t went out to check on

the machine to find out what was wrong. They found out that the problem was so many people had been playing the game that the coin receptacle in the machine was over full and it could not accept any more quarters, which is actually a pretty darn good problem to have, and it indicated that NBA Jam was going to be a monster hit. Not all of Midways titles were as

big of a success, however. There was also Revolution X. That game was a shooter game, so the arcade version had gun controllers attached to it, so you held a little plastic gun and fired at the screen, and the targets on the screen were all sorts of different stuff. I guess you guys are probably familiar with this type of arcade game. Anyway, Revolution X had a really bizarre plot, and even more bizarre was the involvement of the band Aerosmith.

The band actually appeared on screen as characters in the game. They would encourage you in between sequel this is uh they're acting? Was um not great, but the game was really weird. It hadn't share of fans, but overall it just didn't, you know, do so well for Midway. But let's get back to the Mortal Kombat team. They were busy making the sequel to Mortal Kombat, and the bosses in charge were making sure that they were covering their bases with a real carrot and stick approach in order

to motivate employees. I'll explain more when we come back after these messages. According to Mortal Kombat co creator Ed Boone, originally his team was thinking of moving forward on pursuing a licensed Star Wars arcade game. Depending on which version of the history of Midway you're looking at, this could fall either after Mortal Kombat, before Mortal Kombat two, or between two and three, or even between three and four.

It kind of I think a lot of people just have mixed up memories and it's hard to place them in the correct chronology. But anyway, they were thinking about moving on to something else. However, they were told by management that that was crazy, that they should make another Mortal Kombat game, because that game was exploding in popularity and people wanted more, and they thought Oh, that's We hadn't even really thought about that because we were so used to making a game and then you switch and

change to develop a totally different game. So their goal was to improve upon the original Mortal Kombat. They wanted to introduce some new fighters, some new moves, some new stages, and new storylines. To that end, the fighting roster went from seven playable characters from the first Mortal Kombat game to twelve in the sequel. Sonja Blade and Kano, two of the original fighters, would actually be unavailable Immortal Kombat too. They appeared in the background in the relient in the game.

They had both been captured by the big bad guy, Shao Khan, who was the boss of Shang Sung. That was the the big bad guy from the first game, so now Seng Sung would serve as a sub boss fight. He had been rejuvenated, so in the first game he appeared as an old Nan and in the second game he appeared as a much younger man. Following Sean Sung if you were to defeat him, would be Shao Khan's bodyguard Kintaro, who was kind of like a tiger striped version of Goro from the first game, and then The

final boss of the game was Shao Khan himself. New characters included women ninja like Molina and Katana. There was also a hidden female ninja named Jade. There was a monstrous new character named Baraka who could extend blades from

his arms. There were new male ninja that included Smoke, and new Saibot, whom perceptive listeners will recognize is having a name that is Boon and Tobias old backward, so John Tobias and Ed Boone were the co creators of Mortal Kombat, Boon being the lead programmer and Tobias being the lead artist. You also had new characters like Jack's and Kung Lao, and among the new moves were some

that were kind of jokes. You still had fatalities, in fact, now each character had two different fatalities to choose from, but perhaps to poke fun at the reaction to the over the top gore from the previous game. UH. You also had babilities that would turn the loser into a crying baby. And then you also had friendships which uh. Instead of the winner slaughtering the loser, the winner would do something nice like give a present or a smooch,

you know, very sweet. On top of that, the developers chose to speed up the gameplay from the first game, so there was less recovery time between strikes, which amped up the energy of the man, which is considerably The game was the first Midway Cabinet to use the DCS sound system, that was the digital compression system. Williams Electronics had developed the DCS for the pinball game line of Williams. Uh Those were actually still marketed either as Williams Machines

or Bally Machines. So funny that in the old days, Bally and Williams were competitors. Now they both belonged to the same company, but you still had pinball machines that were branded either Bally or Williams as if they were still competing. The Mortal Kombat team received more resources while they were developing the sequel, and while they were busy putting it together, they saw that the home version of

Mortal Kombat was selling extremely well. It's probably a pretty good time to be working within that team over at Midway, probably feeling pretty good about your work. Making things sweeter was that the company was putting in place a kind of bonus policy if a game sold really well, then the team making that game would get a bonus from the revenue generated through the sales. Essentially you're getting like

a cut. According to the documentary insert Coin, these bonuses had a cap of two million dollars, which that is a lot of money. But you might ask, well, why is it capped? Why was there a limit? Well, according to that that documentary where they were interviewing various people from Midway, the managers wanted to make sure that the developers wouldn't get rich and then just retire because they needed those folks to to keep making games so the

company would keep making money. So they said, well, we can't give them more than that or they'll just quit. Why would they keep working? So that was the the reasoning from the management level of capping the bonuses. So the revenue sharing was a carrot. But I also mentioned before the break that there was a stick. So in this case, the real stick was a non compete clause. The employees at Midway were under a non compete agreement that said they weren't allowed to just leave Midway and

work for a compat editor. And while the legality of non compete clauses is something that tends to be a bit questionable legally speaking, it did give Midway the gateway to sue former employees should they try to leave the company and work for someone else, And the goal wasn't to win the lawsuit. The goal was to discourage former employees all by forcing an expensive, lengthy and stressful process into the mix, and it helped intimidate existing employees at Midway.

They would discourage them from following in the footsteps of the person who left. So, if you think that sounds kind of gross, um in agreement with you. The company wanted to keep making hits and for that and he had to hold on to talent, and this was kind of how Midway went about doing that by giving them bonuses and telling them, if you leave and try to work for someone else, we will sue you to the

ends of the earth. Fun times. Meanwhile, there was a little bit of a kerfuffle behind the scenes due to Mortal Kombat two. Three of the actors who were involved in the development Elizabeth Malecki, who had been used as the the stand in for Sonja Blade and the first game, Catalan Zamyar who played Katana, Molina and Jade, and Dr Philip On, who played the Young Shank Sung Immortal Combat Too. They all filed a lawsuit against Midway seeking compensation and

form of royalties. They argue that they should be due some of those royalties because of the revenue generated by sales of the game. So these were the actors who were shot on video and that video was then digitized in order to become part of the animation of the games. In fact, they were more digitized. They use more of the digitized footage in World Combat Too than the stuff that they had shot for Mortal Kombat one. This isn't that strange in the world of acting to demand royalties.

I mean, it's pretty much standard procedure. If your work is going to continue generating revenue then and it stands to reason that you deserve some of that revenue. Um. It's the reason why organizations like the Screen Actors Guild exists in order to help guarantee fairness when it comes to compensation for work. But Midway argued that the actors were all in a work for higher status and thus

not eligible for royalties. The judge found in favor of Midway, and those actors would not return for Mortal Kombat three, which meant the company had to either leave them out or recast those roles with new actors. They also had to get a new Johnny Cage. Daniel Pasina, the actor who had served as the model for Johnny Cage, as well as sub Zero and some others, had also sued Midway. Passina was seeking compensation for the use of his likeness in the home versions of Mortal Kombat Too, which we're

selling really well. He and his fellow actors had been paid a flat hourly rate. Passina says that for the first Mortal Kombat it was fifty dollars an hour, which ended up being a paycheck of a few thousand dollars, and for the second game it was seventy five an hour, but like the other actors, there were no guarantees of

royalties or a cut of any of the homes sales. Ultimately, the court found in favor of Midway, saying that only six percent of players surveyed felt that Passina resembled Johnny Cage in the games, which would mean that his likeness wasn't terribly important. Moreover, the judge essentially said that Possina wasn't famous enough for his likeness to have been a selling point. For Midway, So in other words, no one was rushing to buy the game because Daniel Possina was

in it. Thus no one was trading upon Possina's likeness or fame. Ouch Carlos Posina, Daniel's brother, was working for Midway, still was working for them as an art lead, but he was also the person who portrayed Raydon in those games.

And then he helped out on a project called Tattoo Assassins, which was a planned fighting game from Data East that was meant to be a sort of Mortal Kombat competitor, and Daniel Passina had been tagged to work on it, and perhaps as a punishment, the character that Carlos Pasina portrayed in the first two Mortal Kombat games that being

raid in would be absent in Mortal Kombat three. Pessina would stay on it Midway, but I bet it was awkward that, you know, he had been associated with a planned game to compete with the company's flagship fighting franchise. By the way, Tattoo Assassin never came out. It was planned, but it was never released. At the same time, Midway developers were getting noticed within the gaming industry and beyond, and that interest did give the employees a little bit

more leverage when it came to negotiating salaries and benefits. Yeah, there was the non competing there, but those can only last so long, and that was giving them the chance to say, hey, these other companies are really interested in me. If you don't, you know, if you don't help work with me to to come up with an agreeable compensation plan, I'll leave waited out and then I'll work for them. So there was some leverage that the employees had as well.

It wasn't all a one way street with Midway holding all the cards. Something else that was taking shape in the mid nineties was the movie adaptation of Mortal Kombat, directed by Paul W. S Anderson, who also directed the movie Event Horizon. That's a movie that we've talked about on Tech Stuff several years ago. We I watched it, I think for the first time for that episode to talk about the science and tech in that movie. It

was wacky anyway. The Mortal Kombat movie stitched together a narrative about the tournament and Shang Sung and the various fighters. It's a cheesy, schlocky movie. I can't exactly recommend it. But it did help illustrate how Mortal Kombat had become a legitimate cultural touchstone beyond just the arcades. A sequel came out for that movie in was called Mortal Combat Annihilation. I have never watched that one, and of course now we've got the one movie. So those are just three

examples of Mortal Kombat beyond the arcades. In addition, the game inspired a line of toys and clothing lines, uh comic book series, I mean, Mortal Kombat became a merchandise gold mine. Back at Midway, things were starting to change.

The home video game market was really exploding, and the execs a Midway figured they weren't leveraging that enough by licensing their I P out to other companies, because up to that point, the strategy was partner with other developers, have them create home versions of the arcade games that Midway was producing, and in return, those developers would pay Midway a licensing fee. But the executives wanted to switch things up and start developing games for the home market

directly through Midway or rather Williams. So in the mid nineties the company established a home console game developer division within Midway and started producing games in house. As part of the effort, Midway acquired a company called trade West, transforming into Williams Electronics Incorporated, and then eventually Trade West

would become Midway Home Entertainment. Trade West was the company responsible for some big video game hits, like the infamously difficult Battletoads game and the home console version of Double Dragon. This would be the early foundation of Midway's home video game division. At the same time, the company was still producing arcade games coin operated games. The arcade was entering a slow decline, but it wasn't yet at a point where companies were all ready to just throw in the towel.

The Williams side of Midway was still producing pinball machines branded as either Bally or Williams, and the team's over at Midway. We're still working on arcade video machines. One of those projects even involved the return of a former Midway employee, Eugene Jarvis, who had left company a few years earlier. He was developing a race card game called Cruise in USA. He had found a partnership with Nintendo, but still lacked the resources to get the game finished

on time and on budget. He was able to bring that game under the umbrella of Midway and thus returned to Midway and the game would launch in The Mortal Kombat team got to work on the third game in that series, unsurprisingly called Mortal Kombat three. By this time, the team was starting to feel the grind. They kept at it, but I'm sure enthusiasm was starting to flag

a little bit. Once upon a time, the teams would move to tackle a totally different game with new challenges and new approaches, But Mortal Kombat was a cash cow with k's instead of seas, I guess, and leadership at Midway saw no reason to stop printing money all of a sudden now. The third game saw a couple of big changes. For one, several characters were absent, like Onny Cage, raid In, and Scorpion. None of them were in the game. There were lots of new characters as well, and not

all of them were big hits. For example, Striker, a riot police kind of character, consistently ranks pretty low on the Mortal Kombat character lists. The game also introduced a run button with a run meter that would deplete as you ran, it would refill over time, and the game also featured combos, allowing players to string together certain moves

to create more devastating attacks. Oh in addition to fatalities, bibelities, and friendships were the animal itties, which were finishing moves in which your character would transform into an animal and then slaughter your defeated opponent. You first had to do a mercy move before you did that. Mercy was where you would give your opponent back a little sliver of health just to knock them silly again and then hopefully

pull off the animal itty. The arcade version, An Immortal Comment three, came out on April, and just a few months later the company put out home versions out for various platforms like the PlayStation, the Sega Genesis, and the Supernintendo. At that time, home consoles still couldn't quite match the quality of graphics and gameplay you would get at the arcade, but that gap was narrowing and the home video game

market was starting to overtake arcade games. Midway saw its flagship arcade division lose ground to the home video game department. It was a sign that things were shifting, though Midway was not quite ready to throw in the towel on coin op machines, just yet when we come back, we will wrap up our story about Midway, and this next chapter is the most tumultuous out of all of them, and that's saying something. But first let's take a quick break.

So Midway released the home version of Mortal Kombat three, and that actually cheesed off some arcade operators, the people who own arcades that had Mortal Kombat three arcade machines in them, because they were pointing out that they were paying thousands of dollars for each arcade machine cabinet and then hoping to recoup those costs as players would shove quarters into the machines. But then Midway goes around and just within a couple of months throws out the home

version of Mortal Kombat three. They said, well, now you've removed a big selling point we have, which was that people had to come to our arcade to play this game, and now they don't. So to help appease these customers, Midway developed a second version of Mortal Kombat three called

Ultimate Mortal Kombat three. This version included more characters like Scorpion and Katana who had previously been left out of Vanilla MK three, and it also included some other gameplay elements, and arcade operators who had purchased a Mortal Kombat three machine had the option to upgrade to Ultimate Mortal Kombat three and no additional charge, so that helped create more of a selling point to get people to come in

and play the arcade games. There would be home versions of Ultimate Mortal Kombat three and also Mortal Kombat Trilogy, which tried to do similar things, but no home version is exactly the same experience as the arcade version. Midway management was really keen on using competition within the company to fuel development, so there were multiple teams working on different games and Midway so the Mortal Kombat team was

just one group of developers. Within Midway, there were others working on other projects, and management had a tendency to pit the teams against each other and the belief that competition would drive the teams to greater success, but it also bred a certain amount of resentment within the company between teams. One other team that was working on a new fighting game was The game was called War Gods.

This was in response to new fighting games hitting the arcades like Virtua Fighter, which incorporated depth into the game. It created a sort of three D element, not that you were looking at the game in three D, but you could move within this fighting realm uh in three dimensions.

So the team set out to make a fighting game that would be as popular as Mortal Kombat, but using this approach to three D gameplay elements, and that ended up creating some friction within Midway, particularly as it became clear that war Gods was borrowing a lot of elements from Mortal Kombat, including certain move sets and the use of fatalities that rubbed some of the m K developers the wrong way, and the company itself was going through

yet another change. In Midway acquired Atari Games. Really Williams acquired Atari Games. That was one of the fragments of the old Atari company from the early day is of home video games. That story is a very complicated one. Chuck Bryant of Stuff you should know Fame joined me for a couple of episodes about the history of Atari where we tried to unravel all that. It is crazy complicated,

but anyway. Also in Williams launched an I p O for Midway Games and just spun off Midway so that the arcade in Pinball, parts of what had been w m S, the parent company, would now exist as its own independent entity, with the rest of w MS, the old Williams company, focusing really on casino games. The Williams also ended up including all of the I P for

old Williams based arcade games like Defender and Joust. In that deal, w MS transferred its stake in Midway to WMS shareholders, So now Midway was truly an independent company. And while it was an independent company, Midway in WMS would still share some of the same you know, facility space and also some of the same executive leadership for a while. But this began the process of the two companies parting ways. Neil Nicastro became the CEO of the

new independent company. Neil is the son of Louis Nicastro, who was responsible for purchasing Williams Electronics from another company many many years ago. You might have heard me talk about that. In the first part of this series, the MK team was working on Mortal Kombat four, which would be the final game in the series that would be

released as a coin operated arcade machine. Now, for the first game in the series, ed Boone had served as the soul programmer, but the projects were getting a complex enough that he actually needed to bring on a couple of extra people to help him out as code developers co programmers. This version of Mortal Kombat would rely more heavily on straight up computer animation, so they ditched the digitized version. They were no longer using video of actors

to create characters. They were creating three dimensional, rendered animated models. Uh. The big addition in Mortal Kombat Fur, apart from new characters who were part of the roster, was now that characters also had weapons that they could use with certain move combinations. Before m K four hit arcades, the Home Video Game Division released a side scrolling game called Mortal Kombat Mythologies sub Zero. As the name suggests, this game was focusing on the Sub Zero character, and it was

a big departure from the fighting game format. The PlayStation version also had live action cut scenes, pushing this game into the general realm of FMV games, a category that's near and dear to my heart. They also fm V games tend to be terrible, but I will say the cut scenes for Sub Zero we're not as cringe e as a lot of other FMV games, though I still

found them pretty awkward with fairly low production value. The game itself got mixed reviews, largely because it was seemed to be a punishing experience to play, with a very steep learning curve. Both Mortal Kombat Mythologies and Mortal Kombat four launched in nine seven. Mythologies went to the home market, Mortal Kombat four went to arcades. Around the time m K four hit, John Tobias was eager to start to

look into doing something new. He had worked on a lot of Mortal Kombat titles and he hoped to branch out and make some games that he wanted to make. So he began to think about that, and he chose to resign from Midway in the late nineties, and he left to found his own game studio. Sadly, that did not stay in business for very long and it would close up shop as well. But this is where Tobias kind of says bye bye to Midway now. He left the company just as Midway was transitioning away from arcade

machines entirely. The arcade business in general was slowing way down. The home video game market was clearly more profitable. More people were buying games and staying home to play them on home consoles than going someplace and playing a stand up coin fed arcade machine. The last coin arcade game Midway would release would be The Grid, which was a first person shooter style multiplayer game that the Mortal Kombat team actually developed, and from why I understand it was

sort of a reinvigorating experience to work on something new. However, the title did not sell very well for Midway. It was kind of a flop for Midway. Not a not a creative flop, but a commercial flop. In Midway shut down the pinball division of its arcade business, so you wouldn't get any more new Bally or Williams tables coming out. The pinball machine was practically abandoned at this point. But then Gary Stern, the son of Sam Stern, who was once an executive at Williams. So you heard me talk

briefly about Sam Stern in the previous episode. Anyway, Gary Stern would found Stern Pinball, thus keeping that technology alive. Since then, we've had a few other companies that have grown to produce pinball machines, but for a while, Stern was really the only game in town, so to speak. And um, yeah, I've gotten a chance to speak with Gary Stern a couple of times. Interesting guy, very passionate about the coin operated and pinball industries, and fun to

talk to. Midway also changed the name of Atari Games to Midway Games West, but that division only remained in operation for a couple more years before Midway shut it down in two thousand three. Didn't eliminate it, but it was effectively mothballed. By two thousand one, Midway had shut down its entire arcade division and focused solely on developing

for the home video game market. This meant the company would let go some employees who weren't really able to transition over to the home market, but the company would stay in business while longer releasing several titles for various systems. Mortal Kombat would live on as a series of games released to home and handhold held consoles UH that included sequels like Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance, which was a sequel

to Mortal Kombat four and You. Also had spinoffs like the universally loathed Mortal Kombat Special Forces for the PlayStation, which followed the Adventures of Jack's and was pretty terrible on the financial front. Things were not looking great for Midway. The company had been in a bit of decline before getting out of the arcade business. You might argue that they got out a little too late, or that they did not invest enough in the home video game market

to make a good presence there um. In fact, this was all coming to a head not long after the company first had its I p O. So it goes look on the stock market, and not long after that starts to enter serious financial difficulty. In night, the company had boasted a profit of sixty five million dollars. In nine the operating profit had fallen to eight point three million dollars, which is not the way you want to

see that number go from year to year. In fact, was the last year Midway would post an operating profit at all. Even after shuttering down the arcade division to focus exclusively on the home market, the company still saw losses. In two thousand two, it was a fifty two million dollar operating loss. Ouch In two thousand three, Neil nic Castro stepped down as head of Midway. He still remained on the chair as the chair of the board, but

he stepped down as as president. He was replaced by a man named David F. Zucker, who had previously served as president of Playboy Enterprises, publishers of the Playboy magazine. Anyway, Zucker didn't exactly reinvigorate Midway's financial performance. In two thousand four, there was a twenty five million dollar loss. In two thousand five, it was a one hundred eight million dollar loss.

This was grim stuff. Now. Zucker served as president of Midway for four years or so, but the company telling up a few hundred million dollars in losses in that time. It was not a good look, as they say. And in two thousand eight, Zucker got the boot and Booty got the the position. Matt Booty, that's actually his name. He was the guy who became the interim president of Midway.

Zucker also became one of the defendants in a class action lawsuit that alleged that Midway executives had misled investors with regard to the company's performance. The court ultimately found that all the defendants were not guilty on the basis that the prosecution failed to link investor losses to direct

actions taken by company leadership. Sumner Redstone, the late billionaire and majority shareholder in Viacom CBS invested heavily in Midway back in two thousand four, essentially getting shareholder control of the company. But by two thousand eight he cashed out and he sold all his shares to an investor named Mark Thomas. Every reference I could find to Mark Thomas referred to him as a mysterious investor, so I like to think that he was like in a tan trench

coat and a fedora or something. Anyway, he bought sunder Redstones shares for just a hundred thousand dollars. That was pennies on the dollar for what Sumner had paid for those shares. However, that price tag also carried with it the debt of Midway, which amounted to about seventy million dollars. By this point, the company was already in a death spiral. In two thousand nine, it entered bankruptcy, and that was the real beginning of the end, or maybe the end

of the end. I guess the beginning of the end was really back in the late nineties, Warner Brothers Entertainment swooped in and purchased Midways assets, including the Mortal Kombat intellectual property. Oh And while the Atari Games, Midway West had been shut down it was technically still among the company's assets. That meant that Warner Brothers took possession of Atari Games for a third time. I told you that

Atari story is bonkers. And out of all the folks over at Midway, really only the Mortal Kombat team was able to transition over to work for Warner Brothers. Most of midways facilities were shut down, but that core team survived the purge, and initially they were to join Warner Brothers Video game publishing arm which was called Interactive Entertainment UH and they became known as w B Games Chicago. But in twos the group reincorporated into nether Realm Studios,

still part of Warner Brothers. The first game it published in and can you guess what that game was? If you said a soft reboot of Mortal Kombat, you are correct. The studio has developed several games, not all of them are Mortal Kombat titles. There's also the Injustice games, which are fighting games that feature d C Comics characters in them. The play style is a lot um it's a lot like Mortal Kombat. There's a lot more to be said

about the story of Midway. Remember that began back in the nineteen fifties or earlier, depending on how you look at it, and it ended rather than ceremoniously in two

thousand nine or so. But there are a lot of other things I didn't really touch on and related stories that I hope to cover in future episodes of tech Stuff to kind of talk about the whole industry of coin operated entertainment, as well as the complicated history of different video game developers and the companies that they've worked for and the relationships they've had with one another. But for now, I think it's time to step back from this storied company and this topic, and we'll shift our

focus to something else next week. In the meantime, if you have suggestions for things I should talk about on tech Stuff, please reach out and let me know what those are. The best way to do that is over on Twitter. To handle for the show is text Stuff H s 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.