Back in June, when Digital Eclipse announced it was working on a new collection bringing together a bunch of Mortal Kombat games from across the series's history, many fans' imaginations went wild with all the possibilities of titles that could potentially be added to the collection in the future.
One title, in particular, that proved to be high up on the community wishlist for the game was hopes of a proper commercial release of Mortal Kombat Nitro — a cancelled follow-up to the SNES port of Mortal Kombat that aimed to be a less sanitized alternative with additional improvements, characters (Goro, Shang, Reptile, and Kung Lao), and other bonus features. The developer Digital Eclipse, however, seems to be staying quiet about the possibility of this.
Developed by Sculptured Software, with support from Acclaim in the mid-90s, Mortal Kombat Nitro was essentially pitched as a do-over to make up for the negative response of the original "censored" version, but was nixed at the time as Midway was getting ready to release Mortal Kombat II in the arcades, and needed the developer to start work on that game's console port.
Over the decades, details of the mysterious "lost" Mortal Kombat game trickled out in interviews and social media posts, before eventually drawing headlines again earlier this year, after the former Acclaim employee James Fink demonstrated his own undumped prototype ROM of the game in a 1-hour-plus-long YouTube video with the Mortal Kombat fan, Tabmok99. This inevitably had people questioning whether Digital Eclipse had reached out to Fink to try and coordinate a release of sorts or record some b-roll footage for its interactive timeline.
In order to find out, we reached out to Fink directly to see whether he had been contacted about his copy of Mortal Kombat Nitro and the possibility of incorporating it in the upcoming release. In his reply, however, he quickly told us that, while he was open to working with Digital Eclipse, there were "no conversations" so far and "nothing MK-related on his end," and that Mortal Kombat creator Ed Boon may still have a copy of the ROM, which he gifted him back in the day.
When we reached out to Digital Eclipse through its PR, it declined to make any comment on Mortal Kombat Nitro, including whether the company was even aware of its existence or if it would make a non-playable appearance at the very least. Meanwhile, our attempts to try and reach out to Ed Boon over a period of weeks to check whether he was still in possession of his own ROM of the game have resulted in no response.
This, of course, doesn't look too encouraging for fans who wanted to see it included in some capacity, but we'd argue Digital Eclipse has earned enough trust and goodwill over the years that if it is possible, they will do all they can to make it so (after all, the company has recently announced it will include the WaveNet version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 — another holy grail for the game's fanbase).
Stephen Frost, the game's producer, has even said as much online — though it's worth pointing out he wasn't specifically talking about Mortal Kombat Nitro in this example:
"I will repeat this again as it bears repeating, but we strive to include EVERY game possible in EVERY collection we do. We are fans and that is our #1 goal all the time. However... sometimes, we just can't due to licensing, legal, or technical issues beyond our control.
Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection is scheduled to release digitally on October 30th across Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, PS4, PS5, PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. A physical release is also planned for December.