Modern video games are regularly patched and updated as developers fix annoying bugs, add new content, or even entirely new game modes. But many arcade games from the 80s and 90s, including early games Mortal Kombat the franchise has had many variations. Original Mortal Kombatfor example, at least six versions were released as the developers tweaked and patched the game over time.
These updates such as Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 an update that was released six months after the original Mortal Kombat 3 released in 1995, were supplied on physical ROM chips and had to be installed by slot machine operators. Mortal Kombat developer Midway has another version Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 a planned WaveNet Edition for arcades, which would have added competitive online multiplayer to the game along with other features such as playable versions of fighters. Noob Saibot and human smoke.
But Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 WaveNet Edition was never officially released. It was tried in slot machines in Chicago and San Francisco, but proved too expensive to be successful. Slot machine operators were outraged by the high cost of operating the network, which required expensive T1 leased lines at the time.
Unlike other Mortal Kombat games, the ROM for Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 WaveNet Edition was never released publicly (or thrown away) by anyone who owned one of the few gaming boards in existence. But thanks to the new Mortal Kombat: Legacy Collection from the developer Digital Eclipse, MK enthusiasts can finally play WaveNet Edition UMK3which until this week was a “lost media”.
“We didn’t think WaveNet would be possible at all,” Stephen Frost, head of production at Digital Eclipse, told Polygon in a Zoom interview. “We didn't even think about it early on, mainly because for many of these projects, especially when the games are decades and decades old, we expected—albeit reassuringly—that no one would save anything. The industry was terrible at preserving things.”
WaveNet version Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3According to Frost, “there was such a dumb, obscure thing that was only tested for a very limited period of time that we didn't even think about it” in the early days Heritage Collection project.
However, one Mortal Kombat expert has raised the issue. Stephanie Brownback, head of quality assurance at NetherRealm Studios, who frequently appears on developer Kombat Kast's live streams, asked the Digital Eclipse team if they were considering launching a WaveNet version of the game.
“We were able to track [the game] via Mike Boone, [Mortal Kombat co-creator] Ed Boone's brother, an engineer at NetherRealm,” Frost recalls. Mike Boone was that guy “who had all his dusty old computers stored at home, in his bedroom or in a warehouse somewhere.” Although the developers were unable to trace the source code, they did obtain a ROM dump from Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 WaveNet Edition, owned by Boone.
Meet Daniel Filner, an emulation programmer who has worked with Digital Eclipse on many retro collections, including Atari 50: Anniversary Celebration And Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection. He began evaluating the ROMs provided by Mike Boone to run them under his Moo emulator.
“I got a dump of 25 or 26 ROM files,” says Filner. “If you've ever looked at a gaming computer board, it looks like a city map with streets, grids and blocks – [it's] there are a bunch of ROM chips. A system like the Mortal Kombat system may have four ROM chips for sound, two ROM chips for the main program, and 16 ROM chips for graphics. The first step was to identify, see if the file names matched existing known file names along the path MAME — essentially a Wikipedia of information about how arcade games work — organizes filenames.
“And it turned out that the ROM files they gave me were identical for audio and identical for video. Only the main program was different.” In other words, Filner just needed to work on getting the main program complete with balance adjustments, bug fixes, and other tweaks to the main program. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 game logic working with its emulator. But there was one more unknown: how the WaveNet network worked. Will the game crash or malfunction because it can't connect to the old Midway servers?
Luckily, Filner says, that also went pretty smoothly.
“It's not that exciting a story,” he says, noting that if there's no Internet connection at all, WaveNet Edition is “just happy” and loads fine, much like the regular version UMK3.
“When it boots it says: Okay, I'll try to talk to WaveNe.t and it writes whatever data it tries to write to a block of memory that will be passed to the modem and then checks itself for a while and then says: Well, I guess WaveNet isn't talking to me. I'll just continue the download process and post the gameplay. By default, he had a pretty neat fallback option: just not worry about it too much.”
Mortal Kombat: Legacy Collection owners can see this for themselves when downloading Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 WaveNet publication. Filner shows his work here; WaveNet Edition is the only arcade game in the collection that shows the boot and POST (power-on self-test) that displays when you turn on arcade games.
“When the machine boots up, it tries to download all the WaveNet news,” Filner says. “And unfortunately we don’t have the ability to reconstruct any of this. Whatever was happening was happening on the server side, we didn't get any of it. So until the day they let us look at a dusty old computer or whatever the server was running on, there will be no WaveNet news feature.”
But, as Frost and Filner point out, the WaveNet Edition UMK3 was not actually “completed” because it was never officially released. It has its own bugs, which Filner tried to fix on his own by disassembling the ROM files and studying the game's glitches. And since no one has the source code, it is unclear what could be a bug and what could be an update to the balance or behavior of the game.
“There's a lot we don't know about this yet because we haven't had time to analyze all the balance changes and things like that,” Frost says. “As we play it, we notice the differences, but when it comes out, it will be really interesting for people to start comparing the differences between [WaveNet Edition] And Ultimate MK3 is a kind of herculean task posed by the community. So I'm very happy to see this list grow and grow, such as: Oh, this thing has been lengthened, this one has been shortened. Things like that.”
Frost adds: “There is no written documentation about this. I think there is probably one motherboard or a couple of motherboards to compare to.”
In true Mortal Kombat fashion, fans will have to discover these mysteries themselves by comparing notes, debunking rumors, and determining what secrets the developers have hidden in the program. The most obscure Mortal Kombat relic.
