Modern video games are routinely patched and updated as developers squash pesky bugs, add new content, or even add entirely new game modes. But many arcade games of the ’80s and ’90s, including early entries in the Mortal Kombat franchise, had multiple variations. The original Mortal Kombat, for example, had at least six released versions as developers tweaked and fixed the game over time.
Those updates, like the Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 upgrade that shipped six months after the original Mortal Kombat 3 release in 1995, were shipped on physical ROM chips and had to be installed by arcade operators. Mortal Kombat developer Midway had yet another version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 planned for arcades, the WaveNet Edition that would have added online competitive multiplayer to the game alongside other features, like playable versions of fighters Noob Saibot and Human Smoke.
But Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 WaveNet Edition was never officially released. It was tested in arcades in Chicago and San Francisco, but it was too cost-prohibitive to gain traction. Arcade operators balked at the high cost of running the network, which required then-pricey dedicated T1 lines.
Unlike other Mortal Kombat games, the ROMs for Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 WaveNet Edition were never publicly released (or dumped) by someone who owned one of the few arcade boards that exist. But thanks to the new Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection from developer Digital Eclipse, MK enthusiasts can finally play the WaveNet Edition of UMK3, which has been “lost media” until this week.
“We didn’t think that WaveNet was going to be even remotely possible,” Stephen Frost, head of production at Digital Eclipse, tells Polygon in a Zoom interview. “It wasn’t even something we were thinking about early on, mainly because for a lot of these projects, especially where the games are decades and decades old, the expectation from us — while hopeful — is that no one has kept anything. The industry was horrible at preserving stuff.”
The WaveNet version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, Frost says, “was such an obtuse, obscure thing that was only on tests for a very limited amount of time that we didn’t even intrinsically think about that” during the early days of the Legacy Kollection project.
One Mortal Kombat expert, however, raised the question. Stephanie Brownback, the QA lead at NetherRealm Studios who appears frequently on the developer’s Kombat Kast livestreams, asked the Digital Eclipse team if they’d consider trying to get the WaveNet version of the game up and running.
“We were able to track [the game] down via Mike Boon, [Mortal Kombat co-creator] Ed Boon’s brother, who’s an engineer at NetherRealm,” Frost recalls. Mike Boon was the guy “that had all the old dusty PCs at his house in a bedroom or storage room somewhere.” And while the devs couldn’t track down source code, they did get a dump of the ROMs from an Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 WaveNet Edition that Boon owned.
Enter Daniel Filner, an emulation programmer who has worked with Digital Eclipse on multiple retro collections, including Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection. He got to work evaluating the ROMs provided by Mike Boon to get them running under his Moo Emulator.
“What I got was a dump of about 25 or 26 ROM files,” Filner says. “If you’ve ever looked at an arcade PC board, it looks like a city map of streets, grids and blocks — [it’s] a bunch of ROM chips on there. On a system like the Mortal Kombat system, there’ll be maybe four ROM chips for the sound, two ROM chips for the main program, and 16 ROM chips for the graphics. The first thing was to identify, see if the file names matched up with existing known file names for the way MAME — being essentially the Wikipedia of information about how arcade games work — organizes their file names.
“And it turned out that the ROM files I had been given were identical for the audio and identical for the video. Only the main program was different.” In other words, Filner really just had to work to get the main program, which was full of balance adjustments, bug fixes, and other tweaks to the main Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 game logic, working with his emulator. But there was another unknown: how the WaveNet network worked. Would the game crash, or otherwise malfunction, because it couldn’t connect to Midway’s old servers?
Luckily, Filner says, that was also pretty frictionless.
“It’s not that exciting of a story,” he says, noting that if there’s no internet connection at all, the WaveNet Edition is “just kind of happy” and boots up normally, a lot like the regular version of UMK3.
“When it boots up, it says, OK, I’m going to try talking to WaveNet, and it writes whatever data it’s trying to write into the block of memory that’s going to go to the modem, and then it checks itself for a little while, and then it says, Well, I guess WaveNet is not talking to me. I’ll just go on with the boot process and put up the gameplay. Its default had a pretty graceful fallback of just not worrying about it too much.”
Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection owners can see this for themselves when they boot up Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 WaveNet Edition. Filner shows his work here; the WaveNet Edition is the only arcade game in the collection that shows the boot and POST (power-on self-test) that displays when the arcade games turn on.
“When the machine boots up, it tries to download whatever the WaveNet news is or was,” Filner says. “And unfortunately, we have no way of reconstructing any of that. Whatever was happening was on the server end, we didn’t get any of that stuff. So until such day as we’re handed over a dusty old PC to look at or whatever the server was running on, there’s not going to be a WaveNet news function.”
But as both Frost and Filner note, the WaveNet Edition of UMK3 wasn’t really “finished,” because it was never officially released. It has bugs of its own, which Filner tried to squash himself by disassembling the ROM files and studying game crashes. And since no one has the source code, it’s not clear what might be a bug and what might be a balance or behavior update in the game.
“There’s still a lot we don’t know about this because all the balance changes and things like that, we haven’t had time to sift through,” Frost says. “Playing it, we notice differences, but it’ll be very interesting when this goes out in the wild for people to start collating the differences between [WaveNet Edition] and Ultimate MK3 — sort of a community-driven Herculean task. So I’m really excited to see that sort of list growing and growing, like, Oh, this thing has been lengthened, this thing has been reduced. Stuff like that.”
Adds Frost, “There’s no written documentation of that. I think there’s probably one motherboard in existence or a couple motherboards in existence to compare to.”
In true Mortal Kombat fashion, it’s going to require fans to unlock these mysteries themselves, comparing notes, squashing rumors, and divining which secrets the developers tucked into the programming of Mortal Kombat’s most obscure relic.