The changing video game audience has forced companies to make big changes to their philosophies in order to stay relevant. 25 years ago today, Nintendo (along with a few partners) released a game that represented a massive shift from their wholesome, all-ages image. The company most famous for the genial adventures of a high-jumping plumber staked out new terrain in the arcades with an over-the-top fighting game that featured a screaming announcer and plenty of the red stuff.
That game was Killer Instinct, and a quarter-century later it marks an inflection point in Nintendo’s storied history, the first time they’d take a chance on something outside of their comfort zone and respond to market demands.
In The Blood
It’s hard to overstate how big of a deal fighting games were in the mid-90s. They singlehandedly revitalized arcade culture by transforming video games into an arena where players would match wits and reflexes with each other instead of software, and the fast pace of games like Street Fighter II inspired a flood of imitators. But Nintendo, nearly alone in the industry, simply didn’t get on the bandwagon until it was nearly too late.
To truly understand Killer Instinct, we need to go back to Mortal Kombat. Midway’s digitized arcade brawler was one of the most influential games of the 90s, taking the addictive head-to-head action of Street Fighter II and adding guts and gore to grab the attention of gleeful kids and horrified parents. But when the long-awaited home ports of the game came to 16-bit consoles, Nintendo dropped the ball hard.
Wanting to maintain their status as the “family-friendly” home video game platform, Nintendo demanded Midway change all of the red blood in Mortal Kombat to white sweat and neuter a bunch of the fatalities. That left competitors Sega a huge opening, which they drove right through. The Genesis version had all of the arcade gore (if you put in a special code), and not only outsold the SNES version but also drove hardware sales. Nintendo knew that they needed to strike back, and they grabbed one of their most trustworthy third-party developers, as well as a huge name in the arcades to help.
Unlikely Friendships
In the 1990s, Nintendo was primarily known as a home video game company. The company didn’t have the hardware muscle to compete in the fast-moving arcade space, where machines were constantly evolving to pump out better graphics and more intense experiences. However, they were working on something – the Ultra 64 platform, a next-generation hardware spec that would eventually become the Nintendo 64. They needed a partner with expertise in arcade hardware and distribution, and they found it in WMS Industries, parent company of arcade behemoth Midway.
They inked a deal for Midway to publish two games for the arcade that would then be ported to Nintendo’s forthcoming console. One was racer Cruis’n USA, and the other would be Nintendo’s first in-house fighter. Nintendo exec Ken Lobb visited developers at Rare, who were working on a game called Brute Force. Lobb had lots of ideas for the game mechanics, and a few days later he was placed on the development team as a liason, helping work out systems like auto-doubles and combo breakers that would come to define the gameplay.
KI‘s arcade chipset wouldn’t be the same as the eventual home console, though. One major change was the inclusion of a hard disk drive that the machine could pull data from. This was the first time such a drive had been used in an arcade cabinet, and it allowed Killer Instinct to push graphics that were way more complex than the competition. All of the characters were pre-rendered sprites created from 3D models on high-end Silicon Graphics workstations – the same technique that Rare used for Donkey Kong Country. The detailed animated backgrounds, though, were contained in movie files that would scrub to specific frames depending on the positions of the characters.
All this tech wouldn’t mean a thing, though, if the game couldn’t compete with Mortal Kombat on its own merits. But Nintendo, Midway and Rare were ready to push the content envelope just as hard as they did the technical one.
Bloodletting
While not all of Killer Instinct‘s characters dabbled in gore, the game certainly pushed the envelope farther than any first-party Nintendo title had to date. Keeping with the Mortal Kombat formula, each character had an array of “No Mercy” moves they could use to end the fight, and many of those were quite out of character for the big N.
Cyborg soldier Fulgore spawned gun turrets from his head and peppered his foes with bullets, sprays of blood jetting from impact wounds. Buxom female fighter Orchid unzipped her top (away from the camera) and gave her opponent a sexy heart attack. Fast-moving velociraptor Riptor drove his tail right through his enemy’s groin to gory effect, and animalistic Sabrewulf impaled his foe to spouts of gore. Not all of these No Mercies were R-rated, but a good chunk of them were. Even Sabrewulf’s win screen was enough to elicit nightmares, as a pre-rendered CGI movie of the fighter thrashing an unidentified bloody gibbet around in his mouth greeted you on every victory.
That’s not saying that ultraviolence was the only thing to note about Killer Instinct. The game’s systems, although clunky, were incredibly prescient as to what fighting games would become. While most of the era’s entries let you string a few hits together for added damage, KI was all about extended combos that could be “broken” by well-timed counters. Throw in wildly powerful audio and an amped-up announcer that could be heard over the din of an arcade and you had a quarter-muncher that immediately drew attention.
Nintendo and WMS shipped 17,000 Killer Instinct cabinets to arcades, and it performed well beyond expectations, becoming the #1 moneymaker in the industry the year of its release.
Coming Home
The whole business plan behind Killer Instinct was that the Nintendo 64 was supposed to be ready so addicted players could bring an arcade-perfect experience home. That… didn’t happen. Delays in the hardware development process meant that Nintendo’s next-gen console simply wasn’t ready for prime time until 1996, and by then KI would be yesterday’s news.
So Rare pushed it to the Super Nintendo, with drastic compromises. The aging 16-bit system simply couldn’t handle the huge sprites, intense backgrounds and overwhelming audio of the arcade version. When the port hit consoles, a full 80% of the character animation frames had been removed. In addition, the scaling and zooming effects were gone, end pose FMVs were replaced by stills, and huge amounts of voice acting were taken out. The end result still played fairly well, though, and the name recognition was enough to make it the 12th best selling game of all time on the system.
Nintendo also tried to make the title work on the decrepit, underpowered Game Boy, to disastrous results. Cinder and Riptor were both removed, many moves were taken out to accommodate the portable’s two-button control scheme, and the graphics were nearly unrecognizable. Amazingly enough, even this dire port was the Game Boy’s top seller that year.
The 1996 sequel Killer Instinct 2 was eventually brought to the N64 as a potential launch title, only to see release two months later. The series would sputter to a halt after that, as the fighting game fad disappeared as quickly as it came. The real impact, though, would be on Nintendo’s corporate culture.
New Frontiers
With the Nintendo 64, the company knew that Mario and Zelda wouldn’t be enough to carry the day. Sony and Sega were both pushing technologically advanced systems that played all manner of genres that appealed to adult gamers. They knew that to remain competitive, they would have to follow suit – or, better, lead the pack.
1997 saw them partner with Rare once again to venture into the world of first-person shooters. The James Bond-licensed Goldeneye is widely considered one of the first times that FPS gameplay was successfully executed on a console system, introducing the basic control scheme that would still be used to this day. Addictive local multiplayer – another thing that Nintendo had typically never been particularly interested in – helped make it one of the Nintendo 64’s most iconic titles.
Nintendo’s never going to abandon their core business, and Mario, Zelda and the rest will be appropriate for all ages for as long as they’re in games. But the release of Killer Instinct showed they were willing to stretch a little bit in order to keep fans happy. That flexibility would inspire some of the company’s most interesting games in the future like Metroid Prime.
As for Killer Instinct itself, the rights reverted back to Rare but they couldn’t make anything of them. Microsoft purchased the developers in 2002 and in 2013 they contracted Double Helix to reboot the franchise for the Xbox One, which obviously has no shortage of mature games. If you haven’t played it, it’s a fast-paced and clever reimagining of the core concepts with some very fun mechanics, arguably the best game in the series. Whether we’ll see Nintendo make a strange partnership to tap into the zeitgeist again is unknown, but it’s a good thing that they did.
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