"Notoriously obtuse hardware" meant Mortal Kombat 4 has "never accurately" come to home consoles, but Legacy Kollection found a way to preserve NetherRealm's full arcade roots

With Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection, developer Digital Eclipse is building on its increasingly impressive history of interactive documentaries to tell the full story of Mortal Kombat's arcade era. That meant not just putting together the millionth re-release of the original MK trilogy - it also meant finally having to figure out how to properly port Mortal Kombat 4 to home consoles.

Mortal Kombat 4 is a fully 3D game, in contrast to the digitized sprites used in the earlier entries, and as Digital Eclipse's Stephen Frost tells me in a Summer Game Fest interview, the transition from 2D to 3D marks "an interesting story for the industry as a whole" where every developer "had their own struggles and challenges."

With the development of MK4, we're looking at "that had built all these 2D tools to build and improve Mortal Kombat, and they get to 3D and they're like, 'Well, none of this stuff is useful anymore.' They had to start all over again," Frost explains.

Flawless legacy

"From a preservation perspective," he continues, "the arcade version of MK4 has never accurately been brought to home. It's always been ports that had to make adjustments, or had to make some assumptions about stuff. It just hasn't been an accurate experience overall - especially a pure arcade experience."

There were ports of MK4 to N64, PS1, and PC - and even Game Boy Color - back in the day, but those ports all had serious compromises over the original. Even the later MK Gold for Dreamcast, which purported to be an improved version of MK4, had its own issues, and despite the many, many re-releases of earlier Mortal Kombat titles over the years, we never got an official port that kept that original arcade release intact.

"It's notoriously obtuse hardware," Frost says, explaining that it ran on a custom piece of arcade hardware, called Zeus, powered by a variation of the now long-defunct 3dfx graphics card line. "There's very little documentation on it."

This isn't the first time Digital Eclipse had to create its own solution for the sake of preservation, as the studio previously invested in an Atari Jaguar emulator - something that barely even existed in the world of fan development - to make sure that the Atari 50 collection could tell a complete story of that company's history. They took the same approach with MK4 to make sure the Legacy Collection's story could be complete, too.

Mortal Kombat 4 Arcade - ALL FATALITIES! - YouTube

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"We took it upon ourselves to say, 'Okay, we want to preserve this and have it playable on modern platforms,'" Frost says. "So we're spending the time to get that working up and running. It's sort of similar for Atari 50: we spent a bunch of time creating a Jaguar emulator because there was no accurate Jaguar emulator out there, so we had to spend time to make it. It's the same thing with Mortal Kombat 4. We're trying to make that version accurate."

Of course, there are limits to what Digital Eclipse can do for a single collection, and the fact that this one is specifically focused on MK's arcade era hasn't stopped calls from fans who want "every game ever" to be included in the package, all the way up to the 2011 reboot colloquially known to fans as MK9.

"We can't just jump to MK9," Frost explains. "From a technological perspective, that's a huge endeavor, just to be able to take Mortal Kombat 9 and bring it to all these platforms. But we have to start somewhere, and we have to explain the story from the beginning. Do we want to get to, like, MK9 eventually? That would be phenomenal. But we've got to start somewhere and go there. We can't realistically include everything that everyone wants, just from a project perspective, scope perspective, or technological perspective."

With interactive documentaries covering everything from the history of Atari to the oddball creations of Jeff Minter, there's no studio I'd trust more with Mortal Kombat's legacy than Digital Eclipse. A series this legendary deserves more than simply another collection, and it's clear the devs are going above and beyond to show everything that matters from MK's early days. Heck, it even has the very bad GBA games. How can you beat that?

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