From its debut in 1992 through April 1995, the Mortal Kombat franchise generated over $1 billion in revenue between coin-op machines and cartridges for home systems. That figure accounts for the first two games; their sequels earned billions more. At a moment’s notice, hardcore fans and collectors can scour Amazon, eBay, and Craigslist for any of those versions and browse page after page of listings, giving them plenty of time to find the best deal on MK games and merchandise.
Mortal Kombat Nitro will never appear in those listings. Only two copies exist, and their owners have no plans to part with them.
Over the winter and spring of 1993, Sculptured Software and Acclaim struggled to meet Nintendo’s stringent demands for a sanitized version of Mortal Kombat on Super NES. By release, blood had been changed to sweat, and tamer finishing moves had replaced their grisly arcade counterparts. Early on, however, the Super NES port looked markedly different.
“There were versions from Sculptured that had blood,” says Rob Holmes.
Jeff Peters was the project manager at Sculptured Software charged with leading a small team in converting the arcade game to the 16-bit console. While he understood Nintendo looking out for its family-friendly reputation, he thought MK’s violence wasn’t worth all the fuss.
“The blood and guts were so over the top that they were cartoonish,” says Peters.
While Sculptured Software’s engineers translated the arcade version’s code to the Super Nintendo and their artists processed characters and arenas, Peters spent much of his time on the phone. He would show the latest builds to managers at Acclaim, who sent them to Nintendo for approval. Nintendo would get back to Acclaim, and Acclaim would pass their feedback to Peters, who shared it with the team. Unsurprisingly, most approvals failed to meet Nintendo’s standards. What frustrated Peters was that Nintendo provided little guidance. “As we got the game up and running, we would have to test the fence. Is this blood toned down enough? No? Okay, is this toned down enough?”
After several rounds of back-and-forth, Peters gave Nintendo what they wanted. “We’d say, ‘What if it’s sweat flying off? We’d just make the blood translucent.’ And Nintendo was like, ‘Oh. Yeah.’”
“If you think about it,” says Holmes, “the blood is still there. It’s just gray sweat, or fairy dust, or whatever you want to call it.”
Gray blood, jokingly called sweat by the developers, was deemed permissible so long as gobs of the stuff didn’t splatter over the ground the way it did in the arcade. Sculptured reworked the sweat so it sprayed into the air and then dissipated. Nintendo also established a guideline for fatalities.
“They turned around to us and said, ‘Okay, no blood, and no decapitation,’” says James Fink, product tester at Acclaim.
Banning decapitations meant new fatalities for Sub-Zero, Johnny Cage, and Raiden. Fink and the team at Sculptured brainstormed ideas for new finishers. They had no time to make new graphics. That meant recycling animation frames. Instead of blasting his opponent’s head off with a bolt of lightning, Raiden pumps electricity into them until their skeleton disintegrates into a pile of ash with the skull resting on top. To replace Sub-Zero’s iconic spine rip, the developers created a sequence where the ninja freezes opponents and shatters into chunks of ice.
“It was more of an insult to the defeated player when you do that stupid backhand move and shatter them,” says Fink, who was annoyed at Nintendo’s insistence on watering down content.
Before Nintendo insisted on removing blood and sanitizing fatalities, the team at Sculptured had thought up a revised finisher for Johnny Cage that was arguably better than the one Midway had given him. Rather than punching his opponent’s head off their shoulders, he kicks them through their chest hard enough to send blood, bones, and their liver—”that’s what some blobs looked like,” Peters says of the gore—exploding out of their backs. “It’s a good example of what a fatality was before it had to go through Nintendo’s sanitizing machine.”
Nintendo rejected the finisher. Developers at Sculptured and Acclaim threw up their hands — Nintendo had only said no decapitations — but did what was expected and removed the gore. In the final version, Cage kicks his foot through his opponent’s chest and watches as they squirm at the end of his leg. Same animations, squeaky-clean results.
After uploading the latest build for Acclaim — which took forever to send over modem — Acclaim called Peters to report that Nintendo had rejected the game again. “They came back to us like a half-hour later said, ‘Oh, by the way, we need you to take out Kano’s heart fatality,’” Fink says.
That posed a problem for Sculptured and Acclaim. “We didn’t have time to create a new fatality, or we wouldn’t have met the deadline for Mortal Monday,” Fink says. In the final product, Kano tears something out of his opponent’s chest, but what that something is, is open to interpretation. According to Fink, it’s a heart that Sculptured’s artists painted gray. Nintendo gave their consent, and the game was ready for manufacturing.
As frustrating as they found jumping through Nintendo’s hoops, Acclaim and Sculptured Software knew they had no choice but to comply. “They could fail your game if they didn’t like what was in it,” Peters says.
No one at Sculptured or Acclaim was surprised when the Genesis version outsold the Super Nintendo port nearly five to one. But there was another, less publicized reason players preferred Mortal Kombat on Sega’s platform.
Sculptured’s port went through hell during its short span of time in development. Early on, one programmer claimed he could code a one-to-one conversion of the arcade game with no help. Months passed before it became obvious he was in over his head. Now even more pressed for time, Peters put three programmers on the project. Along the way, the code responsible for handling player input and referencing which animations to call got mangled. The result was a control scheme that was borderline unresponsive. When you tap up to jump, your character stands there as if no button was pressed. You have to press hard or hold buttons down for the game to acknowledge them.
Fink ground his teeth every time he read a review criticizing the Super NES’s port’s controls. He wasn’t angry with them for knocking his favorite game. He was angry because he knew they were right.
“It didn’t play like that originally,” he says. “It actually played, in all honesty, closer to the arcade than the Genesis version.”
What really bothered Fink was that the Super Nintendo’s graphics were much closer to the arcade than Sega’s. If not for Nintendo’s restrictions and the port’s flawed code, the Super NES would have hosted the best port, no contest.
Fink took this complaint to Rob Holmes and suggested a way to make things right. “I said, ‘Listen, I’ve got this idea. Street Fighter II got Street Fighter II Turbo. Let’s make Mortal Kombat Nitro.’”
Holmes liked the idea, and he thought Nintendo would like it, too. Mortal Kombat was selling so well on Genesis that Nintendo was slowly losing ground they had gained by securing exclusive rights to the first home adaptation of Street Fighter II. Nintendo had already relented and informed Acclaim they would allow blood in ports of the next Mortal Kombat. An updated version of MK with all the blood and the original fatalities would delight fans, which would please Nintendo.
Fink corrected him. He wasn’t proposing a clone of the arcade game. That was just a starting point. He envisioned more blood, more fatalities, more costumes, and tons of new features. Holmes told him to document his ideas. Ecstatic, Fink returned got to work on his design pitch. “At the time as a 21-year-old kid, I wasn’t the CEO of a company, but that I got green-lit on this, I was like, ‘All right, finally, I can make the game the way it should be.’”