Digital EclipseFew video game series have the same kind of cultural cache as Mortal Kombat. In the ‘90s, and all the way until now, the sound of “Fatality” can be heard across arcades and homes around the world, as gamers finish off their opponents with a winning move. Not only has the series endured the decades until now, but it fundamentally changed how video games were perceived with its brand of hyperviolence.From its humble beginnings to mainstream success, the prolific franchise certainly has a rich history to explore. The development team at Digital Eclipse is finally hoping to tell the definitive story of Mortal Kombat’s creation, and even includes how iconic elements like the Fatality came around.“Initially, no one was going to have a fatality, and Shang Tsung was just going to chop your head off with a sword. They did decapitation animations for everybody, and then decided they weren’t going to do that, for whatever reason,” Digital Eclipse’s head of production Stephen Frost tells Inverse, “But they had this decapitation animation, and that becomes Johnny Cage’s fatality, where he uppercuts them and pops their head up – and everybody gets one.”Digital Eclipse made a name for itself with the “interactive documentary” style of compilations like Atari 50, The Making of Karateka, and Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story. Now the studio is bringing its expertise to telling the story of Mortal Kombat through an absurdly ambitious collection that packs in eleven games, three hours of documentary footage, and more.Inverse had the chance to sit down with Frost, as well as editorial director Chris Kohler, about the lasting legacy and many secrets of Mortal Kombat, the historical bugs that are finally getting fixed, and the real potential of the interactive documentary.This interview had been edited for clarity and brevity.When did plans for this collection start? Did the list of games you had in mind at the start match what’s in the collection now?Frost: With every Digital Eclipse product we work on, part of the preliminary process that we need to go through is to evaluate, at least at a high level, which versions of the games or which games we want to include in the collection, and which platforms. That’s required because especially if we're doing some sort of licensing agreement, you need to get ahead of what you're allowed to include and if there’s any licensing issues. Some additional ones might be removed because of technical reasons, like we can’t emulate those platforms.There were some stragglers here and there due to legal licensing reasons, such as, Mortal Kombat 3 for Genesis. And then there are obviously other platforms that might have been technical hurdles or just are so obtuse that we weren't able to include them. We wanted to include things like the Sega Master System, right? But again, those are games that, while big on that platform, and in Brazil and other areas, are not necessarily so huge here.Many games in the Kollection feature multiple versions, like MK1’s Arcade, SNES, Genesis, Game Boy, and Game Gear versions. | Digital EclipseThe outlier, even from the beginning, we knew it was going to be Mortal Kombat 4. From a technical perspective, we knew we wanted to include it because of the era that it was in, but we didn't know at the start that it was going to even be possible to put it on simpler or weaker-powered systems like the Switch — because no one has done it before. No one has emulated the arcade version of MK4 accurately before. So it was a Herculean task, but it was still on the list because of the hopes and dreams of everyone to get it done.Kohler: All these things are a roll of the dice. You just try to be flexible and work with people. We're always talking with people, right? We might not be working with them initially, but we might be talking with someone for years and years, and eventually, hopefully, knock on wood, we become available when the others become available.That's good for us, because we're not huge. We're still a relatively modest studio, so that allows us to react a bit more than if we were 300 people working on multi-year projects. Being able to adjust and course correct and say we’ll make people available is what allows us to have these opportunities.The hours of documentary footage sequentially walk through the creation of the series, and even before it. | Digital EclipseYou’ve talked a lot about how this Kollection is the most extensive effort Digital Eclipse has had for the behind-the-scenes content. Going from The Making of Karateka and Llamasoft to this, why has that element become such an important feature for you? Do you think it’s something video games, as a whole, could use more of?Kohler: This is the big test for our interactive documentary structure. Because Atari 50 has sold pretty gosh darn well for a compilation of Atari games, and it's gotten a lot of recognition. That was the first product we put out that we called an interactive documentary — rather than just the classic, here’s a big list of games go pick one at random and have fun with it. When you do that, it limits your audience.Instead, it was this concept of “let’s use the games as the building blocks of a chronological story, and then the games point the way along that story.” You can actually watch the evolution of video games happening. We then take this and apply it to a single game like Jordan Mechner’s Karateka, or we can apply it to the life of one person like Jeff Minter. Or we can apply it to Tetris Forever, and that’s where we first partnered up with the documentarians at Area 5.So now with Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection, we’ve got all those under our belts, we know what we’re doing, and we know it resonates with people. But this is a product that is going to hit a much larger audience than any previous documentary we’ve done. So the funny thing is, you can make these things, get a lot of coverage of them, and then you find out that there are still many, many people who don’t know what we’re doing at Digital Eclipse. You hear about a product like this and you still get this picture in your head of this very old style, antiquated style, of presenting classic games — that’s what people think it is.With this, we really upped our partnership with Area 5, and gave them more resources and time to put together what are some incredibly documentary video segments in close partnership with us. You could take these and put them on HBO Max right now, and I don’t think anyone would perceive any difference in the quality.Ed Boon, often cited as the creator of Mortal Kombat, features heavily in the documentary, alongside the likes of Mike Boon, John Tobias, and many more. | Digital EclipseWe really think this structure is how we should be presenting legacy games like this. Now, with Mortal Kombat, the difference is that with something like Karateka, we’re surfacing a game that has unfairly been forgotten in terms of its impact on video game history. We’re resurfacing that story and saying why people should look at it again.Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection doesn’t have that problem. Our inboxes and social media comments are filled up every day, even for years preceding this, asking, “When are you guys gonna do Mortal Kombat?”“In MK 2, the arcade [version], Shang Tsung can’t do a stage fatality on a certain level. There are these legacy bugs people have just gotten accustomed to”So with Mortal Kombat, you can go from the menu and immediately jump to just playing the games — because we feel like that’s what some people’s preferred experience is going to be. Then they’ll come to the documentary later on, and go “What’s down here?” And hopefully be pleasantly surprised. And for the audience coming in, maybe they bought into Mortal Kombat or maybe not, but they bought into the Digital Eclipse experience — and there’s over three hours of documentary video this time. And beyond that, all the visual materials and things like that.Frost: I want to add that it was great having existing examples of this when we went in and talked to Netherrealm. Because people [we work with] still don’t quite understand what we do and why it’s important.They have this stuff, but like it’s not really important, and say, who wants a notepad and sketches, and stuff? But when we sat down with them, and I was showing Mike Boon stuff and saying this is what it looks like — they have an epiphany. Everything is important, and then right after they start coming out with all the stuff they didn’t think was valuable or interesting, because now they understand the context.When we were doing the Blizzard Arcade Collection back in the day, more of a standard collection, Blizzard was like, “Well, I have a picture of the first office building Blizzard was in. I’ve got a picture of Allen Adham putting a key in the door on the first day. That’s not interesting, right?”And I’m like, that’s fascinating. We can use that to tell a story of look where this company came from, those very humble beginnings of one guy in a one-room office — not even that long ago.One of the more interesting features of the Kollection is a character map, documenting which games each character appeared in and their personal stories. | Digital EclipseWe’ve seen this year with some remasters, like Final Fantasy Tactics, that studios have had to rebuild games from scratch because they lost everything. Did you run into any archival issues like that?Kohler: It’s always a miracle when somebody does come up with something. In the case of the Blizzard Arcade Collection, we were very surprised when it turned out they had a source repository for us to reference.Because when you have source code, it’s very easy to say we’re emulating the games, not rebuilding them from scratch. When you have that, you can look at the emulation and say I can make an improvement to this game because I know how it works on the back-end, and I know exactly what to do to change it. Things like wide screen mode, four-player in Rock ‘n Roll Racing [in the Blizzard Arcade Collection]. In this particular case, we did have access to some elements of the source code.Frost: We go in expecting we’re not going to get much. Especially for the generations of games we work on and the number of years that have gone by, the odds of people having them or having stored them are slim.Fortunately, in this case, Mike Boon had this really old computer at his house, right? This is how stuff is found — it always comes from an old computer at someone’s house. He said let me go through it, and that allowed us to find a lot of this source code. It becomes almost an Indiana Jones archaeological exploration. Which version of the game is it? Is it complete? The more accessibility to that original source code, the more it allows for more ambitious quality-of-life improvements, bug fixes, and things like that.While you’ll likely want to go in order, you can jump around the timeline of the documentary if you want. | Digital EclipseIn MK 2, the arcade [version], Shang Tsung can’t do a stage fatality on a certain level. There are these legacy bugs people have just gotten accustomed to, but it was never the intent of the original development team to have these issues present. Having access to the source code lets us see what the issue was, and now we have time to address it.Kohler: One thing I really love, if we get a delivery of something, it’s almost like Christmas. Being able to poke through whatever and see what I find. In this particular case, the big thing that we got was to go through essentially all of the sprites and imagery graphics for Mortal Kombat 1, 2, and 3. It’s all stored in this proprietary file format where you have to use a proprietary reader that the Netherrealm team developed back in the day.Once you get inside, you’re just going through bits of sprites and comparing that to what actually shipped. You start finding things wrapped up in these because it’s content on somebody’s hard drive. And there are things they were going to have in Mortal Kombat 1, like they were going to have every character do an introductory animation — they’d come on screen and do an animation, like you see in later fighting games.They were going to do that in MK1 and only really got through creating the sprites for Johnny Cage’s animation, in which he waves at the crows, removes his sunglasses, and throws them at the crowd. What’s interesting is the way Mortal Kombat was created. Simplifying it, they’d capture the footage, John Tobias would sit there with an imaging tool and carefully remove the backgrounds from all the sprites and line everything up. Then hand it to Ed Boon, who’s the programmer/gameplay designer sitting there implementing the sprites and implementing these little bits. How does this move work? What sprites am I going to use? How fast is it going to go?So we have sprites, but as far as how those sprites would have been implemented into the game, we don’t know because it was never done. Like Johnny waving his hand, how many times would that repeat? So we state that we had to reconstruct all this. Our artist spent a lot of time on some of those animations.The Kollection features recreations of unused sprite animations, alongside their history. | Digital EclipseIn particular, the fact that Shang Tsung in Mortal Kombat 1 was going to have a fatality. And, in fact, we found out through this that’s where fatalities come from. Initially, no one was going to have a fatality, and Shang Tsung was just going to chop your head off with a sword. They did decapitation animations for everybody, and then decided they weren’t going to do that, for whatever reason. But they had this decapitation animation, and that becomes Johnny Cage’s fatality, where he uppercuts them and pops their head up — and everybody gets one.So we tell that story, and not only do we tell it, but we have the sprites we’re actually going to show and say, “It might have looked like this in the game.” That’s a great example, because if we didn’t have access to this stuff, we’d just have to imagine these things.Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection launches on October 30 for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 1&2, and PC.