Super Nintendo game would have added blood, new fatalities and more playable characters
An update to the fairly underwhelming port of the first Mortal Kombat on the Super Nintendo (SNES) was planned by James Fink, a former Acclaim employee, who showed a number of the design documents and a playable version of the unreleased game.
It was called Mortal Kombat Nitro Edition — and it was important that it made it out before the release of the Midway developed Mortal Kombat 2 hit arcades in November of 1993.
“There was one particular bug that bothered me, which was how the game played,” said Fink during an interview about the original Mortal Kombat port on the SNES. He added that they wanted to get rid of the blood sanitizing of the initial release, as both he and Ed Boon were not happy with how that version of the game turned out.
“I brainchilded [sic] the Mortal Kombat Nitro version, and from that I decided I could expand maybe, since there was a gap between MK1 and MK2,” said Fink.
“I figured it would go over great, but unfortunately it didn’t,” Fink stated.
“Midway pushed back against it, because they were releasing Mortal Kombat 2 in the arcades,” Fink said.
Fink goes on to explain that the characters in Mortal Kombat Nitro Edition would have two fatalities, new outfits, good and bad endings, and more.
“Reptile was playable and had both Sub-Zero and Scorpion’s move sets. Shang Tsung was playable had the sword put in as well all morph by performing fatalities, and Goro was playable,” wrote Fink on X.
He went on to document some of the gameplay problems with the SNES port of Mortal Kombat, which was released in September 1993, mainly citing the input delay and how it messed with the game’s combo system.
Fink also noted that Mortal Kombat Nitro Edition was just a release for the Super Nintendo, as no arcade port was planned, and that he only burned two sets of ROMs for the unreleased game.
You can check out the design documents below, along with a video of Fink and Tabmok99 playing the unreleased build of the game.
Click images for larger versions
Video from Tabmok99.
Source: Event Hubs
