Limited resources were a big factor in the development of the original game
While it’s nice to know your exact destination when you set out on a journey, it’s not always easy to plan where you’re going to end up in advance, especially when it came to video game development 30 years ago.
Take the 1992 release of the Mortal Kombat for example, as series co-creator Ed Boon was asked if the original’s special moves were all fully planned out in advance, or if the team was just experimenting with things during the development process.
“There weren’t that many special moves that we actually captured,” said Boon, noting that Scorpion’s spear and Sonya’s leg grab were two attacks they had actually intended to capture during the filming session with the actors.
“A lot of [special moves] came long after we had video taped the actors,” Boon stated. “They were just using existing frames of animation, so we just put something in.
“Johnny Cage’s Shadow Kick was just his side kick, we just made a whole bunch of duplicates of it and it’s this really cool effect,” Boon mentioned.
“So a lot of these things were just constructed, Sonya’s Square Wave Punch, we never captured that, it was long after the fact,” noted Boon.
“A lot of it was very spontaneous, keep in mind, this is four guys in their 20s set loose, that’s why it’s so visceral, we grew up in the 80s watching action movies, Enter the Dragon, Star Wars, everything like that,” Boon said.
Next, Boon discusses the limited resources the development team on the original Mortal Kombat had to work with, citing low memory as a big hurdle to work around.
“Everything was on EPROM chips, and each one of those cost money, so every time we added memory that added cost to the game and lowered profits, so it was all a constant negotiation,” he said.
“That was so instilled in us, that when we came up with a new move, we were just counting our resources,” Boon stated.
“That was a big part of the development of [Mortal Kombat] was to make it fit in this box, you don’t have unlimited space for your ideas, so it was ideas that could fit in this box,” Boon noted.
“Scorpion’s Teleport move was using his jump punch move, there was no extra frames of animation for it,” Boon mentioned.
“There was quite a bit of reusing of frames and images, it was just a management of that thing,” he added.
“That was a big part of [Mortal Kombat], but that was always the case with arcade games back in the day, make something really cool that will fit in a box,” Boon concluded.
One of these moves, which we previously documented, was Kano’s helicopter knife special, which couldn’t be included because it was too many frames of animation.
You can check out the rest of this interview in the video embedded above, which was put together by Brian Tong.
Source: Event Hubs
