Mortal Kombat? How About Friendly Kombat
The Mistake: In the early ’90s, the original Mortal Kombat hit the arcades so hard that it was a no-brainer that it would also basically print money for home console makers. Unfortunately, whereas the arcade business was an awesomely cool lawless hellscape, the home console realm was ruled by parents worried that their kids would stick Scorpion-style chained kunai inside their wrists or gather dangerous amounts of snowballs that they’d bring to school. Parents, politicians, and news media outlets pressured Sega and Nintendo into avoiding making a deal with the devil, but only Nintendo was dumb enough to say no to such a sweet deal and ended up heavily censoring their port of the original Mortal Kombat.
NetherRealm Studios
The Result: The genesis/mega drive version also featured censorship, but it also included a cheat code that made all of the violence from the arcade version available in the console version. That cheat code doubled as an instant-win code business-wise, as it caused everyone to flock to the Genesis port of the game, outselling the Nintendo version 5 to 1.
Related: One Of The World’s Best ‘Mortal Kombat’ Players (Is A Latin Music Star)
Always going for dumb game formats
The Mistake Remaining in the cartridge business for too long, then avoiding putting their games on CDs and regular DVDs. Isn’t it mind-blowing to think that despite its enormous success, Nintendo never had a console that read the best type of media format of its time?
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