Mortal Kombat 4 - Development

Development

Co-creator of the series Ed Boon found difficulties leading the team in charge of developing Mortal Kombat 4 due to how large the staff had become since the first Mortal Kombat title, with him being the only programmer. Therefore, Todd Allen and Mike Boon (Ed's younger brother) joined on as a programmer with Ed noting the staff was more than twice its original size. The Midway staff wanted to remove the comical elements from the previous Mortal Kombat titles, so they focused on the making of the fatalities. On the other hand, the animalities finishing moves from MK3 were removed since the transformation of a character into an animal was considered to be hard to make in 3D graphics. In order to make fatalities more entertaining, it was decided to make a few replays from different angles of the scenes where the characters' bodies explode or a ripped off. Since actors were no longer needed to make the characters' movements with the exception of adding some motion capture elements, the staff found it easier to make fatalities as it was all done by animation.

The gameplay was planned to be similar to the predecessors although this would be the first game from the series to be made in 3D. Another desire from the staff was avoid making all the mistakes they made in War Gods, Midway's first 3D title. To advertise the game, Midway organized a 35-stop road tour of the United States. The version of the game shown in the tour had nine characters, and within these nine Noob Saibot, who would become a hidden character in the arcade and console ports. As Ed Boon was skeptical about the quality of the result noting that the gameplay would be slower than previous titles, he decided to hand-animate frames with timings in a similar fashion to Street Fighter EX. Art director Tony Goskie created a 3D model for each character of the game, whom he called "Meat". It was later decided to make him a playable character as part of a hidden Easter egg. Players first learned of the character's given name after the text "Meat lives!" was placed on Ed Boon's website promoting Mortal Kombat 4's 3rd arcade revision. Years after the game's release, Boon commented that he and the staff should not have made Shinnok the final boss from the game as previous titles used enormous characters as bosses.

Eurocom was in charge in the making of the home versions from the game and they worked for eight months to finish the Nintendo 64 port. One of their main objectives was to maintain 60 frames per second as they never did it with a 3D fighting game. While all the traits from the arcade mode were added to the home version, Eurocom had to change the polygon count to "squeeze into the resources of the Nintendo 64". Eurocom was also assisted by Ed Boon and the lead artist on the coin-op, Dave Michicich. While the home versions were still in development, Ed Boon gave fans hints about things that would be in the ports of the game. These hints included Goro being a playable character and the extra costumes.