Midway Looking to Sell Mortal Kombat Franchise, Proposes Bonuses and Cuts Ex-employee Payments

MK3 was the game. ultimate, trilogy... 4, 5, 6... crap

when does the managements learn, that by selling the only thing you make money with, the company goes to hell?

I would rather that management immolate themselves while the ex-employees urinate on them screaming "Fatality!"

This is the fault of 3D? Please tell me that was a lame lame joke. I agree that some games sucked in 3D, but others have to be 3D and are just better in 3D. If you can't handle it you could always just keep with the side scrolling old school games. Part of Midway's problem just like Atari and many many other companies is they push out crap games with cruddy story lines and horrible controls/ideas. There isn't one single problem it's just a huge comedy of errors. Blaming it on 3D and not living 20years in the past is just plain stupid.


p.s. the guy in the pic with the gun belt is Deathstroke, he's part of the DC universe.

My bigass rant: Midway, or whoever gets MK, needs to take Mortal Kombat back to its roots, back to MK and MK II. I used to be a MK fan but around UMK3 things started getting a bit too wacky, since then I see it as a franchise going downhill.
They could take Mortal Kombat in a new direction, make it "controversial" again, they could make it a brutally violent fighting game but keep it simple to play like the originals, same control scheme. Drop or re-think some of your character roster, keep the classic ones, and bring some new, good, characters.
Drop the art style that the recent games have used, go for a stylized "gritty" look that replicates the Digitized Actor aesthetic of the 2d games, invest in some fucking worthwhile R&D on some tech or features for a Sweat Map/Layer on characters, use this same Sweat Map for mapping smeary blood mixed with sweat, so that characters get all grimy and blood-soaked. Make the player's character maintain some grime buildup through the course of the game. Use tech smartly. Ditch the additive-blended particle effect bullshit. Ditch shitty looking neon blood, this is next-next-gen mannnn. Take some references from the movie Bloodsport and other similar 80's films for fighting styles and fighter backgrounds. Keep the wacky alternate reality immortal-shit tournament stuff. Play the original arcade PCB's of MK and MK II and listen to the sound effects and take note, go for the raw almost kung-fu style sounds you used to have. Bring back the original Scorpion spear sound from MK 1, it fucking owned. Bring back Test Your Might, make it kick ass like the original did, and as a bonus use it to "feature" your Female characters using the Sweat-Map tech + other physics. Drop all wacky finishing moves, go for Fatalities only, re-think them to make them relevant and "controversial", even if it means simplifying them down. Work more environmental things in that are throwbacks to The Pit. etc etc etc Come on guys, geeze, this shit is so easy, just change your approach, simplify a bit, go back to the basics, rethink what you're doing, you can make MK actually worthwhile again to people like me who used to love the games in the arcades and 16-bit era, but grew distant based on the direction that all the successive sequels went in...

Here is hoping Capcom buys out Mortal Kombat and does a proper sequel. Plus, we could finally have a Street Fighter vs MK game, which is something I know a lot of us talked about back in the day when MK was at it's height of popularity.

Oh geez. This story is being blow out of proportion - Mortal Kombat isn't for sale - the *possibility* of it being sold is mentioned in these documents, but it is not necessary. Here's an a longer explanation of what the documents actually mean:

http://www.trmk.org/forums/showpost.php?p=148903&postcount=1

Basically, selling MK is listed as one of the possibilities for Midway to get the $1.2 million bonus. However, it is one of two actions that can be fulfilled to get that bonus, the other being filing the plan of reorganization (basically a schedule on how they will raise money and repay their debts). Only one of the requirements (selling MK or filing the plan of reorganization) needs to be met to get the bonus. In fact Midway gets the $1.9 million bonus if the the plan of reorganization they file *doesn't* include plans to sell MK. In short, there are no plans to sell MK and Midway has a huge incentive *not* to do so.

It wasn't because of 3D. It was because Mortal Kombat was the Image Comics of fighting games. Once you saw Supreme rip the intestines out of yet another villain for the 10th time, it got old.

MK II was probably the high water mark, but I doubt many people can honestly try to argue that it ever reached the quality of, say, a Street Fighter II or a Virtua Fighter.

Let's just be honest. The best parts of MK were the ridiculous cartoon-style uppercuts, the fatalities, the insanely loud sound effects, and the fun of "secret messages" and Easter Eggs. It was the downstream rock band that spruced their live acts with fake blood and pyrotechnics, and made their album interesting with backward messages for the "cool kids" to decipher and know.

Now, everything has an easter egg, and Midway did nothing to improve the gameplay. I stopped caring when all of a sudden Raiden (I think...) could whip out a big Crusty-The-Clown-type mallet from nowhere and smash Sub Zero with it. It just looked stupid, and it killed the gameplay.

Ok, yay, blood. We get it...

This is how 3D ruined great franchises. It is a typical "Because we can" phenomenon. Why make all great 2D games in 3D now? Because we can. Did anyone look at Simon the sorcerer 3? Or played 3D Mortal Kombats? The examples are endless. Mario 64 was nice, but did it feel anything like the old mario games? It went downhill from there with our favourite italian Plumber.

It is the same with the trick/animation movies these days. Why only produce computer animated movies? Because we can. They have no spirit and not a thing of the awesome touch Disney movies had.

We need more handdrawn games, with the technology today, you can make awesome stuff, like some games have already proven. But go ahead, release more crappy Mortal Kombat and Sonic Games in 3D. Maybe you will some day learn that some games don't work better in your fancy "because we can" 3D.

It reads to me that management is going to sell off the company's assets, split the profits in terms of bonuses and let the rest sink and die.

I hope someone decent gets the Atari Games/ classic Midway ip and that the employees don't get completely screwed, :(

whos the dude in the 3rd picture with an ammo belt and a sword. that doesn't make much sense

It's pretty sad how these guys haven't put out a good game in 10+ years in one of the most legendary series of all time. They should take a good, hard look at Street Fighter IV and then feel bad about themselves.