Mortal Kombat 2 was a pretty advanced arcade game when it launched in 1993, to the point where none of the contemporary home consoles of the time could really do the fighter justice. It turns out, though, that one console of the time actually was capable of handling MK2 – it just took 32 years for somebody to do the work of bringing the game to 3DO.
The 3DO launched in 1993 as the brainchild of EA founder Trip Hawkins. The idea was that the console spec would be licensed out to third-party manufacturers, who would then make their own devices that could play 3DO games. The first 3DO consoles were built by Panasonic and launched at an eye-watering price tag of $699 USD, which is about $1,500 today, accounting for inflation – a price that could put the PS5 Pro to shame.
With that price tag, you might expect the 3DO to have some pretty advanced hardware for the time, and nowhere is that clearer than with a new, fanmade Mortal Kombat 2 port to the failed console. You can check out some footage below, and if you’ve played any other contemporary ports of MK2, the quality is immediately apparent.
We’ve got giant sprites, minimal load times, and fantastic sound – features that even the game’s best ’90s ports struggled to match. “The assets are sourced from the original arcade version but the game itself was coded from scratch and eyeballed to try and match the arcade gameplay,” according to a Reddit post from the port’s developer, who goes by FenixTx119, and that just makes this version all the more impressive.
These days, the need for a full-on console port of MK2 is a bit questionable since emulation can let us play the original arcade release in nearly perfect fidelity, but I’m always going to be impressed by the ingenuity of fan developers bringing classic games to derelict consoles. If we’re getting the likes of GTA 3 and Vice City on the Dreamcast, the sky’s the limit to what retro consoles can manage.
