In 1992, there were few games bigger than Midway's fatality-fueled arcade fighting game Mortal Kombat, so it only made sense that someone would eventually take on the challenge of bringing the popular experience to consoles, in the pursuit of profits.
The New York-based publisher Acclaim Entertainment would eventually accept this responsibility, teaming up with studios like Probe Software and Sculptured Software to release ports for the SNES, Game Boy, Game Gear, Mega Drive/Genesis, Master System, MS-DOS, and the Commodore Amiga between 1993 and 1994. But what you might not know is that another studio almost helped out with this lucrative project, but ended up torpedoing its chances after the owner went on a family holiday to Portugal, when a Spiderman project was going "horribly wrong."
In the past, it's been fairly well documented that Software Creations' 1992 action platformer, Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade's Revenge, for the SNES, didn't necessarily have the smoothest development cycle, thanks to a now-infamous fax that surfaced in 2022 showing the tremendous pressure the team was under to get the game out the door. Far less known, however, is that the project's issues ultimately prevented the studio from working on Mortal Kombat, potentially costing them "$40 million in royalties on all the versions across the various formats."
The story comes courtesy of a small aside in a Retro Gamer feature on Software Creations from 2013 (issue 122), where the company's co-founder, Richard Kay, shared the following anecdote:
"[Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade's Revenge] started going horribly wrong. Acclaim were 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.
"I 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... 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!"
Seeing this, we couldn't help but wonder whether any former Acclaim employees had memories of it, so our first port of call was to email Paul Provenzano, the producer on Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade's Revenge, who sent the aforementioned fax. He gave us a bit more background on Acclaim's issues with Software Creations during that game's development:
"It was late in the summer, and they were late. 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.
"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. Richard should have been there. The visit went well; they explained how they were addressing issues and how they thought they could catch up. There was some tension, but it was understandable. Apparently, back in Oyster Bay, 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. (The use of all caps was NOT screaming; it was to make sure the questions brought up were separated from the answers.) I was told to get it done even if I missed my flight.
"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. But it's also logical that PROBE was the developer in the end. PROBE had a track record of doing conversions and Acclaim had them do a bunch of games well before Acclaim went on a buying spree and purchased Probe."
Looking at the above, it seems that Provenzano believes Kay's story to be too accurate. But just to make sure, we also contacted Rob Leingang, the producer across all home platforms of Mortal Kombat, who skirted the question, but did suggest that if Software Creations was difficult to work with, it wouldn't have been selected for the task.
"All the SKUs of Mortal Kombat 1 & 2 were produced by my team and me, and could be called ports, although that term is pretty loose considering the difficulty of bringing a full-blown arcade game into a home console or handheld game device.
[To answer your question], there was bias [against] developers who did not show an ability to deliver product on time and at a high quality level. I personally worked and travelled to insure quality and delivery of every SKU/version of this franchise for 2 years. From working directly with artists, programmers, producers, and studio heads/owners to working directly with Nintendo and Sega.
This group of games/ versions was one of the biggest undertakings, if not the biggest, in the history of the game software business of that era. We utilized the best available partners to work with at that time."
Several years later, Software Creations did eventually get to work on a Mortal Kombat game: Mortal Kombat 3 for the Nintendo Game Boy. But we have to imagine it wasn't quite as lucrative as those original ports would have been for the studio.
Today, Software Creations is best known for its work on original titles such as Solstice, Equinox, and Plok, Marvel and Disney games, and its collaborations with Nintendo on titles, including Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball, Tinstar, and Mario Artist: Paint Studio. It seems it could have potentially added another feather to its cap, though, if events had turned out a little differently.