"You lost $40 million": Dev had Mortal Kombat rights yanked away because he went on a family vacation when the publisher believed he "should have been" chained to the studio

Given Mortal Kombat's wild success at the arcades of the early '90s, home ports were inevitable – and they came from an array of different developers at differing levels of quality. At least one of them might have come from storied British developer Software Creations, if the company's co-founder hadn't been on vacation at a critical point in the development of a SNES Marvel game.

At the time, Software Creations was working with publisher Acclaim on the SNES action title Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade's Revenge, and things were not going smoothly. As Software Creations co-founder Richard Kay told Retro Gamer magazine in 2013, the game's development "started going horribly wrong. Acclaim was screaming at us and threatening litigation, and we ended up with three teams on this one game. I went to Portugal with my wife and one-year-old son, and I got a fax from Acclaim saying they wanted me to fly home and sort out the problem with the game."

Kay said, "'No, I'm on holiday with my family,' because, really, there was nothing more I could do; the team was already working on it. I got a fax the next day saying, 'The guys upstairs have said because you won't show commitment we're pulling Mortal Kombat.'"

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Now, over a decade after that interview, and more than 30 years after the events Kay described, the folks at Time Extension have tracked down some of the other people involved in the story for further insight. That includes Acclaim producer Paul Provenzano.

"It was late in the summer, and they were late," Provenzano explains. "There was a real danger they would cause us to miss Christmas, and Richard WAS on vacation, which I reported back to my boss the second day I visited Software Creations."

Remember that this was the early '90s, back when games were still universally physical objects that had to be manufactured and sold in retail stores – and the bulk of those sales happened around the US shopping season leading into Christmas. "The average gaming 'expert' online is too young to know the stranglehold the hardware companies had on publishers, with manufacturing and Christmas representing a huge percentage of the potential profits a game would make," Provenzano says. "Richard should have been there."

31 years ago we were working on SNES 'Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade's Revenge'. We had very little development time for this project and had 3 experienced coders on-board to get it done. Here's a FAX from production at Acclaim to give you a flavour of the pressure we were under 1/2.

— @kevedwardsretro.bsky.social (@kevedwardsretro.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-03-25T14:58:17.491Z

According to Provenzano, "the news that Richard was MIA on holiday was a HUGE issue with my boss and the Chairman of Acclaim. On my last day, I was tasked with creating a FAX that highlighted the seriousness of the situation." That fax actually made the rounds on social media a few years ago, showing dozens upon dozens of points of improvement Acclaim was demanding for the Marvel game.

"I was told to get it done even if I missed my flight," Provenzano says. "It was never really meant for the team; we already went over everything. It was meant to emphasize the seriousness of the matter to Richard. It was done in the cramped 'business center' small room of my hotel in Manchester, with my luggage beside me and no spell check. Was this meant to support the decision that Richard was not getting Mortal Kombat? It was not my decision to make. But I have never heard or seen my boss as angry as he was with Richard for not being there. And it was his decision who got Mortal Kombat, so it seems logical."

Ultimately, most of the home versions of Mortal Kombat were developed by Probe Software, a studio which Provenzano says had an established track record in building conversions for Acclaim. The ports weren't perfect, but they were wildly successful, giving players a chance to practice their moves at home before returning to the full-fat MK experience in arcades.

So how costly was the loss of Mortal Kombat? Here's how Kay put it in that 2013 interview: "A few years later after I'd left Creations I went to the first E3 show and I bumped into an Acclaim exec and he said 'You know, you lost $40 million in royalties on all the versions across the various formats.' And I do occasionally still wake up in a cold sweat over it... so now I'm paranoid about project plans to the point I actually do more project plans than actual projects!"

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