It's that time again—New York Comic Con is back! East Coast's largest pop culture convention is taking over Gotham City from Oct 6th to Oct 9th and will be filled once again with exciting announcements, cosplay, guest panels and so much more from your favorite franchises across anime, gaming, film, TV and comics.

Something you can expect to see during NYCC this year in the world of premieres is the new Super Mario movie trailer premiere, starring Chris Pratt. Announced on Twitter (below), the first teaser trailer for the film will premiere at the convention.

Join us October 6th at 4pm ET for the teaser trailer premiere of Nintendo & Illumination’s upcoming Super Mario Bros. film, releasing April 7, 2023. pic.twitter.com/1jEFnlvCnU

— New York Comic Con (@NY_Comic_Con) September 22, 2022

Originally announced back in 2018, Super Mario: The Movie is being produced by Nintendo and Illumination. The film would resurface again during the September 2021 Nintendo Direct, where Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto announced the film's cast.

When Does The Super Mario Bros. Trailer Drop?

It will be shown on October 6 at 1pm Pacific / 4pm Eastern / 9pm UK.

For those attending NYCC in person, the convention's official website notes that the trailer will be shown at the Empire Stage.

IGN's NVC Podcast will be hosting a live celebration of Super Mario during this time and we will be reacting to the trailer when it's made available to the public!

IGN's NVC Podcast's Live Celebration of Super Mario at NYCC 2022

We’ll be hosting a livestream here and across our many channels on platforms like YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, Facebook, and more. Here’s the full list of places you can watch:

• IGN.com (homepage)
• IGN's Facebook Channel
• IGN’s Twitter
• IGN's Twitch Channel
• IGN’s Youtube Channel
• IGN's TikTok
• IGN's iOS App
• IGN's Android App
• IGN's PlayStation 4 App
• IGN's Xbox One App
• Roku
• IGN App for Android TV
• IGN for Amazon Fire TV
• Apple TV
• IGN 1 on Samsung TV Plus
• Pluto TV
• Plex Live TV

Catch Up On Super Mario Movie News

Release Date

The film was originally set to release in December 2022. However, Universal Pictures announced earlier this year that the film's release date had been pushed back to April 7, 2023 in North America.

Voice Cast

• Chris Pratt as Mario
• Anya Taylor-Joy as Peach
• Charlie Day as Luigi
• Jack Black as Bowser
• Keegan-Michael Key as Toad
• Seth Rogen as Donkey Kong
• Kevin Michael Richardson as Kamek
• Fred Armisen as Cranky Kong
• Sebastian Maniscalco as Foreman Spike

Charles Martinet will also have a series of featured cameos in the movie, known for his longtime voice acting of both Mario and Luigi in the Super Mario video game series since 1992!

Related News

• Is "The Morton Jankel Cut" any better than the 1993 theatrical version? Find out in our Super Mario Bros.The Movie Extended Edition Review.
• While you wait for the new Mario movie release, check out our list of upcoming video game movies.
• Who will be at NYCC 2022? You can see the entire guest list here. Some of the biggest names in the biz confirmed to be guests of honor include:
  • Oscar Isaac (Moon Knight)
  • Cassandra Peterson (Elvira Mistress of the Dark)
  • Brendan Fraser (Doom Patrol)
  • Christopher Lloyd (Back to the Future)
  • Michael J. Fox (Back to the Future)
  • Sebastian Stan (Infinity War & Endgame)
  • Leigh Bardugo (Demon in the Wood, Shadow and Bone)

Taylor is the Associate Tech Editor at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.

Filmmakers are just as much artists as photographers, painters, and sculptors, so there is some level of creative license that they have for the content they produce. With the advent of big-budget streaming though, some filmmakers might not be up to the task of making sure everything they make is as watchable as they might hope compared to the perfect environment of a movie theater.

Why House of the Dragon is so dark

House of the Dragon's seventh episode, titled "Driftmark," is one such example. The show’s director, Emmy-award winner Miguel Sapochnik, specifically chose an extremely dark motif for a majority of the episode. For many viewers at home, this meant long stretches of time where barely anything was actually visible on screen.

Fans have complained about this online and HBO has confirmed that this was a deliberate choice.

Most televisions released in the last several years come with some version of HDR support, and that’s where we need to start. HDR, which stands for high dynamic range, takes the previous standard video format — standard dynamic range or SDR — and widens it to encompass more colors and shades. HDR content allows for brighter whites and darker blacks, in addition to allowing for a wider range of colors — more shades of reds, greens, and blues, for example.

There are many HDR profiles, which means that depending on which one your TV can read and which one content is being broadcast in, you'll see something different. The one that HBO is using is a proprietary one called Dolby Vision. Dolby Vision HDR is supposed to streamline that previously messy HDR experience and make it so everyone is seeing basically the same thing. It's a good goal, but with so many differences among panel technology, this only kind of gets everyone in the general ballpark and not necessarily the same seating section.

As a result, even if you and I are both watching a Dolby Vision stream, our experiences aren’t necessarily going to be the same. Still, in this case, both of us probably had a pretty dim experience.

Dolby Vision, luckily, has a few user-level tweaks that can be made to it. Combined with some other settings that are pretty easy to adjust, you can make your viewing experience of this particularly dark episode significantly better. None of this is too difficult either.

Strategies for making House of the Dragon easier to see

1. To start with, if you can easily turn off HDR, that will probably have an immediate impact on how much more of this episode is visible. If you can’t, you’re not out of luck. While some televisions will let you turn HDR off entirely and bypass this problem, many televisions do not — or make it so confusing to do so that it’s not worth trying to figure it out just to enjoy one episode of a weekly show. Depending on your TV, you might be able to squeeze a bit more light into these scenes through your Picture menu.

Some TVs do have ways of making the picture in this particular episode easier to see, I just wouldn’t go so far as to say it is a blanket “improvement” since there are tradeoffs. I’m going to use two different TVs as an example of how you might find a way to make this episode a bit more watchable, but the options you’ll have are going to vary.

I do want to take this time to mention that adjusting “brightness” and “contrast” on most TVs doesn’t actually make the picture brighter or increase, but instead tends to just wash out what little image is there. You can adjust this on your own, and for some TVs it might make the picture easier to see, but it has limited payoff and you’re likely not going to be happy with how washed out the picture quality gets. Odds are it will make the screen whiter, but the subjects aren’t going to be any more visible than they were.

All that said, let’s start with my Sony A80J OLED, a model from 2021. When I fire up the show, it automatically changes from standard definition to Dolby Vision, which I can see when I go to the Picture Settings. There, my usual long list of options has been significantly cut down to just three: Vivid, Dolby Vision Bright, and Dolby Vision Dark.

If you thought the default setting, which is Dolby Vision Bright, was hard to see, have a laugh and switch over to Dolby Vision Dark: it really does just look like a black screen. Even with all of my other brightness settings such luminance and backlight turned up to max, the scene is pretty difficult to make out in either of these settings.

2. Vivid, however, does make the picture significantly easier to see. This does come at a cost as the picture becomes very blue in this particular example scene. You can expect the colors for the whole episode to be a bit wonky when you have Vivid selected, but at least you’ll be able to see what is going on. This is probably the only time I will recommend watching anything in Vivid since it usually warps the colors so badly, but here I will make an exception for the sake of visual clarity.

Switching over to the Hisense U7H, a model from 2022, which uses a mini LED display, and we can get some much better results. My Sony OLED might provide better color accuracy and true blacks, but when content is super dark, the lack of overall brightness means there isn’t a lot I can do to make the picture appear brighter. Hisense has far less of a limitation, as it can get more than twice as bright as the Sony.

Even though I am once again only given Dolby Vision options — this time Dolby Vision IQ, Dolby Vision Dark, and Dolby Vision Custom, all of which appear to be varying levels of bad — there are a few other things I can change to boost the brightness.

I managed to get a pretty bright scene by making sure that my backlight was at high and the backlight level was at 100. With the Hisense, I usually have these set to those levels all the time because I have it set up in a room with a lot of windows and I need that brightness to overcome the glare. But your options for brightness don’t stop there.

3. If you go down to the Advanced Settings options, you’ll find a setting that dramatically improves the perceived brightness of this episode: Active Contrast. Generally speaking, the results of Active Contrast are mixed since it’s based on what is on screen and isn’t a singular blanket change for all content. But in this case, it had a huge impact on how much brighter the scenes appeared. Overall contrast — that is to say, the difference between whites and blacks — is pretty poor and the overall picture is kind of a washed-out gray, but I at least can make out what is going on.

Bear in mind, I took all of these test photos in the middle of the day when glare and natural light are at their peak, so all of these settings will look a lot better at night when the surroundings are dark.

4. One other feature you might be able to adjust is the gamma, usually found in the advanced calibration settings inside your picture settings. When turned to its lowest numerical setting can have an impact on the overall apparent brightness of scenes, though my televisions had this option grayed out due to the Dolby Vision HDR format taking precedence.

Unfortunately, there's no easy solution

Unfortunately, there is no cure-all for every television make and model that will give you the best viewing experience possible for super-dark scenes. Even comparing the Sony OLED best result against the Hisense best result shows how much variation there is between just two displays. But if you do have the ability to make similar adjustments to the ones I’ve outlined, you might at least be able to enjoy this episode a bit more.

Once you've got your television issues sorted, check out our explanation of how a survival in the episode changes Game of Thrones history. You can aalso check out our House of the Dragon episode guide, which will let you know when to expect the eighth episode.

Jaron Schneider is a freelance contributor at IGN.

Filmmakers are just as much artists as photographers, painters, and sculptors, so there is some level of creative license that they have for the content they produce. With the advent of big-budget streaming though, some filmmakers might not be up to the task of making sure everything they make is as watchable as they might hope compared to the perfect environment of a movie theater.

Why House of the Dragon is so dark

House of the Dragon's seventh episode, titled "Driftmark," is one such example. The show’s director, Emmy-award winner Miguel Sapochnik, specifically chose an extremely dark motif for a majority of the episode. For many viewers at home, this meant long stretches of time where barely anything was actually visible on screen.

Fans have complained about this online and HBO has confirmed that this was a deliberate choice.

Most televisions released in the last several years come with some version of HDR support, and that’s where we need to start. HDR, which stands for high dynamic range, takes the previous standard video format — standard dynamic range or SDR — and widens it to encompass more colors and shades. HDR content allows for brighter whites and darker blacks, in addition to allowing for a wider range of colors — more shades of reds, greens, and blues, for example.

There are many HDR profiles, which means that depending on which one your TV can read and which one content is being broadcast in, you'll see something different. The one that HBO is using is a proprietary one called Dolby Vision. Dolby Vision HDR is supposed to streamline that previously messy HDR experience and make it so everyone is seeing basically the same thing. It's a good goal, but with so many differences among panel technology, this only kind of gets everyone in the general ballpark and not necessarily the same seating section.

As a result, even if you and I are both watching a Dolby Vision stream, our experiences aren’t necessarily going to be the same. Still, in this case, both of us probably had a pretty dim experience.

Dolby Vision, luckily, has a few user-level tweaks that can be made to it. Combined with some other settings that are pretty easy to adjust, you can make your viewing experience of this particularly dark episode significantly better. None of this is too difficult either.

Strategies for making House of the Dragon easier to see

1. To start with, if you can easily turn off HDR, that will probably have an immediate impact on how much more of this episode is visible. If you can’t, you’re not out of luck. While some televisions will let you turn HDR off entirely and bypass this problem, many televisions do not — or make it so confusing to do so that it’s not worth trying to figure it out just to enjoy one episode of a weekly show. Depending on your TV, you might be able to squeeze a bit more light into these scenes through your Picture menu.

Some TVs do have ways of making the picture in this particular episode easier to see, I just wouldn’t go so far as to say it is a blanket “improvement” since there are tradeoffs. I’m going to use two different TVs as an example of how you might find a way to make this episode a bit more watchable, but the options you’ll have are going to vary.

I do want to take this time to mention that adjusting “brightness” and “contrast” on most TVs doesn’t actually make the picture brighter or increase, but instead tends to just wash out what little image is there. You can adjust this on your own, and for some TVs it might make the picture easier to see, but it has limited payoff and you’re likely not going to be happy with how washed out the picture quality gets. Odds are it will make the screen whiter, but the subjects aren’t going to be any more visible than they were.

All that said, let’s start with my Sony A80J OLED, a model from 2021. When I fire up the show, it automatically changes from standard definition to Dolby Vision, which I can see when I go to the Picture Settings. There, my usual long list of options has been significantly cut down to just three: Vivid, Dolby Vision Bright, and Dolby Vision Dark.

If you thought the default setting, which is Dolby Vision Bright, was hard to see, have a laugh and switch over to Dolby Vision Dark: it really does just look like a black screen. Even with all of my other brightness settings such luminance and backlight turned up to max, the scene is pretty difficult to make out in either of these settings.

2. Vivid, however, does make the picture significantly easier to see. This does come at a cost as the picture becomes very blue in this particular example scene. You can expect the colors for the whole episode to be a bit wonky when you have Vivid selected, but at least you’ll be able to see what is going on. This is probably the only time I will recommend watching anything in Vivid since it usually warps the colors so badly, but here I will make an exception for the sake of visual clarity.

Switching over to the Hisense U7H, a model from 2022, which uses a mini LED display, and we can get some much better results. My Sony OLED might provide better color accuracy and true blacks, but when content is super dark, the lack of overall brightness means there isn’t a lot I can do to make the picture appear brighter. Hisense has far less of a limitation, as it can get more than twice as bright as the Sony.

Even though I am once again only given Dolby Vision options — this time Dolby Vision IQ, Dolby Vision Dark, and Dolby Vision Custom, all of which appear to be varying levels of bad — there are a few other things I can change to boost the brightness.

I managed to get a pretty bright scene by making sure that my backlight was at high and the backlight level was at 100. With the Hisense, I usually have these set to those levels all the time because I have it set up in a room with a lot of windows and I need that brightness to overcome the glare. But your options for brightness don’t stop there.

3. If you go down to the Advanced Settings options, you’ll find a setting that dramatically improves the perceived brightness of this episode: Active Contrast. Generally speaking, the results of Active Contrast are mixed since it’s based on what is on screen and isn’t a singular blanket change for all content. But in this case, it had a huge impact on how much brighter the scenes appeared. Overall contrast — that is to say, the difference between whites and blacks — is pretty poor and the overall picture is kind of a washed-out gray, but I at least can make out what is going on.

Bear in mind, I took all of these test photos in the middle of the day when glare and natural light are at their peak, so all of these settings will look a lot better at night when the surroundings are dark.

4. One other feature you might be able to adjust is the gamma, usually found in the advanced calibration settings inside your picture settings. When turned to its lowest numerical setting can have an impact on the overall apparent brightness of scenes, though my televisions had this option grayed out due to the Dolby Vision HDR format taking precedence.

Unfortunately, there's no easy solution

Unfortunately, there is no cure-all for every television make and model that will give you the best viewing experience possible for super-dark scenes. Even comparing the Sony OLED best result against the Hisense best result shows how much variation there is between just two displays. But if you do have the ability to make similar adjustments to the ones I’ve outlined, you might at least be able to enjoy this episode a bit more.

Once you've got your television issues sorted, check out our explanation of how a survival in the episode changes Game of Thrones history. You can aalso check out our House of the Dragon episode guide, which will let you know when to expect the eighth episode.

Jaron Schneider is a freelance contributor at IGN.

From its debut in 1992 through April 1995, the Mortal Kombat franchise generated over $1 billion in revenue between coin-op machines and cartridges for home systems. That figure accounts for the first two games; their sequels earned billions more. At a moment’s notice, hardcore fans and collectors can scour Amazon, eBay, and Craigslist for any of those versions and browse page after page of listings, giving them plenty of time to find the best deal on MK games and merchandise.

Mortal Kombat Nitro will never appear in those listings. Only two copies exist, and their owners have no plans to part with them.

Over the winter and spring of 1993, Sculptured Software and Acclaim struggled to meet Nintendo’s stringent demands for a sanitized version of Mortal Kombat on Super NES. By release, blood had been changed to sweat, and tamer finishing moves had replaced their grisly arcade counterparts. Early on, however, the Super NES port looked markedly different.

“There were versions from Sculptured that had blood,” says Rob Holmes.

Jeff Peters was the project manager at Sculptured Software charged with leading a small team in converting the arcade game to the 16-bit console. While he understood Nintendo looking out for its family-friendly reputation, he thought MK’s violence wasn’t worth all the fuss.

“The blood and guts were so over the top that they were cartoonish,” says Peters.

While Sculptured Software’s engineers translated the arcade version’s code to the Super Nintendo and their artists processed characters and arenas, Peters spent much of his time on the phone. He would show the latest builds to managers at Acclaim, who sent them to Nintendo for approval. Nintendo would get back to Acclaim, and Acclaim would pass their feedback to Peters, who shared it with the team. Unsurprisingly, most approvals failed to meet Nintendo’s standards. What frustrated Peters was that Nintendo provided little guidance. “As we got the game up and running, we would have to test the fence. Is this blood toned down enough? No? Okay, is this toned down enough?”

After several rounds of back-and-forth, Peters gave Nintendo what they wanted. “We’d say, ‘What if it’s sweat flying off? We’d just make the blood translucent.’ And Nintendo was like, ‘Oh. Yeah.’”

“If you think about it,” says Holmes, “the blood is still there. It’s just gray sweat, or fairy dust, or whatever you want to call it.”

Gray blood, jokingly called sweat by the developers, was deemed permissible so long as gobs of the stuff didn’t splatter over the ground the way it did in the arcade. Sculptured reworked the sweat so it sprayed into the air and then dissipated. Nintendo also established a guideline for fatalities.

“They turned around to us and said, ‘Okay, no blood, and no decapitation,’” says James Fink, product tester at Acclaim.

Banning decapitations meant new fatalities for Sub-Zero, Johnny Cage, and Raiden. Fink and the team at Sculptured brainstormed ideas for new finishers. They had no time to make new graphics. That meant recycling animation frames. Instead of blasting his opponent’s head off with a bolt of lightning, Raiden pumps electricity into them until their skeleton disintegrates into a pile of ash with the skull resting on top. To replace Sub-Zero’s iconic spine rip, the developers created a sequence where the ninja freezes opponents and shatters into chunks of ice.

“It was more of an insult to the defeated player when you do that stupid backhand move and shatter them,” says Fink, who was annoyed at Nintendo’s insistence on watering down content.

Before Nintendo insisted on removing blood and sanitizing fatalities, the team at Sculptured had thought up a revised finisher for Johnny Cage that was arguably better than the one Midway had given him. Rather than punching his opponent’s head off their shoulders, he kicks them through their chest hard enough to send blood, bones, and their liver—”that’s what some blobs looked like,” Peters says of the gore—exploding out of their backs. “It’s a good example of what a fatality was before it had to go through Nintendo’s sanitizing machine.”

Nintendo rejected the finisher. Developers at Sculptured and Acclaim threw up their hands — Nintendo had only said no decapitations — but did what was expected and removed the gore. In the final version, Cage kicks his foot through his opponent’s chest and watches as they squirm at the end of his leg. Same animations, squeaky-clean results.

After uploading the latest build for Acclaim — which took forever to send over modem — Acclaim called Peters to report that Nintendo had rejected the game again. “They came back to us like a half-hour later said, ‘Oh, by the way, we need you to take out Kano’s heart fatality,’” Fink says.

That posed a problem for Sculptured and Acclaim. “We didn’t have time to create a new fatality, or we wouldn’t have met the deadline for Mortal Monday,” Fink says. In the final product, Kano tears something out of his opponent’s chest, but what that something is, is open to interpretation. According to Fink, it’s a heart that Sculptured’s artists painted gray. Nintendo gave their consent, and the game was ready for manufacturing.

As frustrating as they found jumping through Nintendo’s hoops, Acclaim and Sculptured Software knew they had no choice but to comply. “They could fail your game if they didn’t like what was in it,” Peters says.

No one at Sculptured or Acclaim was surprised when the Genesis version outsold the Super Nintendo port nearly five to one. But there was another, less publicized reason players preferred Mortal Kombat on Sega’s platform.

Sculptured’s port went through hell during its short span of time in development. Early on, one programmer claimed he could code a one-to-one conversion of the arcade game with no help. Months passed before it became obvious he was in over his head. Now even more pressed for time, Peters put three programmers on the project. Along the way, the code responsible for handling player input and referencing which animations to call got mangled. The result was a control scheme that was borderline unresponsive. When you tap up to jump, your character stands there as if no button was pressed. You have to press hard or hold buttons down for the game to acknowledge them.

Fink ground his teeth every time he read a review criticizing the Super NES’s port’s controls. He wasn’t angry with them for knocking his favorite game. He was angry because he knew they were right.

“It didn’t play like that originally,” he says. “It actually played, in all honesty, closer to the arcade than the Genesis version.”

What really bothered Fink was that the Super Nintendo’s graphics were much closer to the arcade than Sega’s. If not for Nintendo’s restrictions and the port’s flawed code, the Super NES would have hosted the best port, no contest.

Fink took this complaint to Rob Holmes and suggested a way to make things right. “I said, ‘Listen, I’ve got this idea. Street Fighter II got Street Fighter II Turbo. Let’s make Mortal Kombat Nitro.’”

Holmes liked the idea, and he thought Nintendo would like it, too. Mortal Kombat was selling so well on Genesis that Nintendo was slowly losing ground they had gained by securing exclusive rights to the first home adaptation of Street Fighter II. Nintendo had already relented and informed Acclaim they would allow blood in ports of the next Mortal Kombat. An updated version of MK with all the blood and the original fatalities would delight fans, which would please Nintendo.

Fink corrected him. He wasn’t proposing a clone of the arcade game. That was just a starting point. He envisioned more blood, more fatalities, more costumes, and tons of new features. Holmes told him to document his ideas. Ecstatic, Fink returned got to work on his design pitch. “At the time as a 21-year-old kid, I wasn’t the CEO of a company, but that I got green-lit on this, I was like, ‘All right, finally, I can make the game the way it should be.’”

Outlining Mortal Kombat Nitro was easy. Street Fighter II’s first upgrade, Champion Edition, had added the previously unplayable boss characters to the roster. Nitro would do the same by making Goro and Shang Tsung playable. Reptile would join the lineup, too, and he’d possess all of Scorpion’s and Sub-Zero’s special moves and move twice as fast, just as he did when under the AI’s control. Fink understood the appeal of secret characters—players were still dissecting the arcade and home versions to uncover anything else Ed Boon and John Tobias may have hidden away—so he knew he couldn’t make Reptile playable without adding a new hidden character to replace him. His suggestion was the original Kung Lao, Liu Kang’s ancestor, who had defeated Shang Tsung 500 years earlier only to be slain by Goro, who became the reigning champion.

The biggest change would be players’ ability to take their character down light or dark paths in the tournament. If you choose a “good” character such as Sonya or Liu Kang, and only kill “bad” characters such as Kano, you’ll unlock a new costume reflecting your alignment. Kill other good characters, and you’ll turn evil.

“So, for example, Sonya is given the opportunity to kill good characters, but if she does, she gets a bad ending. But if she just kills Kano, who was her target, you’d get the good ending,” Fink says.

Acclaim approached Midway with Fink’s design for Mortal Kombat Nitro. Releasing an upgrade was doable on a technical level: Sculptured had archived versions with blood instead of sweat, and they could reinstate fatality animations such as Johnny Cage’s gorier chest kick. Fink had an artist draft sketches showing characters in new outfits based on good and evil alignments: a blood-red scorpion, Cage wearing golden pants. Before long, Sculptured Software had a prototype where players could choose Reptile or the two bosses. It was glitchy, but it was playable.

Before Nitro progressed further, Midway told Acclaim and Sculptured Software to halt development. The notion of anyone creating a sequel or upgrade to their game was a nonstarter for Boon and Tobias. Acclaim’s bosses backed down without a fight. It was early 1994, and Mortal Kombat II was bringing in millions of dollars in quarters; soon, it would be time for Acclaim, Sculptured Software, and Probe to tackle conversions.

“They were afraid that by the time MK Nitro came out, the sales would interfere with MKII,” Fink says.

Fink disagreed. Casual players would buy home versions, but as a diehard arcade rat, he believed hardcore MKII fans would stick to the arcade’s superior hardware regardless of a home port’s availability. Bob Picunko, who had spearheaded Mortal Monday’s campaign and was already wading through the early stages of MKII’s marketing campaign, saw things differently. Sculptured had worked until their deadline on the first MK. Assuming MKII’s Super NES conversion was just as stressful, they would need to devote every spare minute to coding, debugging, and approvals.

“The issue was, could we really compromise Mortal Kombat II by taking the development team to make a half-step version of the first game?” Picunko says. “Also, would a consumer who bought MK1 buy Nitro, plus another game coming out right after it?”

Both perspectives had merit. The most devoted MK fans who only had a Super Nintendo and were disappointed with their toned-down experience probably would have leaped at the chance to buy a better version. After all, the most impassioned Street Fighter II players dropped cash on every update. However, sales history showed that most consumers weren’t thrilled at paying another $60 to $80 for new versions.

When Capcom’s fiscal year ended in March 1993, it had sold 6.5 million copies of SFII for Nintendo’s 16-bit machine, the first appearance of the game at home, and Capcom’s most successful single-platform release of all time as of 2022. Street Fighter II Turbo for Super Nintendo added more characters, more special moves, and speedier fighting, but topped out at 4.1 million. Super Street Fighter II, the franchise’s last release on Super Nintendo, only sold two million. On Sega Genesis, Street Fighter II: Special Champion Edition—the equivalent of SFII Turbo—came in last at 1.65 million.

The numbers told the story. Some MK fans would add Nitro to their collection, but not enough to risk affecting Mortal Kombat II.

“To this day, I believe Mortal Kombat II on Super Nintendo is the best home version of that game,” Picunko says. “That game probably would not have been as good if the developers would have had to work on an in-between version.”

Fink still believes in Nitro’s design and owns one of two chips containing Nitro’s code. His copy has blood, Kano’s original heart-rip fatality, and Cage’s chest kick complete with blood and guts. Years later, he gave the other ROM chip, which contained more playable characters, to a friend from Midway. “I still have one, which is very wonky, and one that I gave to Ed Boon,” Fink says. “He might have lost it by now. Who knows? This was almost 30 years ago.”

This excerpt is from Long Live Mortal Kombat: Round 1. Written by David L. Craddock, it goes behind the scenes to reveal untold stories from the franchise’s arcade era. The book will be released on October 8, and is available for pre-order on Amazon and from the publisher.

From its debut in 1992 through April 1995, the Mortal Kombat franchise generated over $1 billion in revenue between coin-op machines and cartridges for home systems. That figure accounts for the first two games; their sequels earned billions more. At a moment’s notice, hardcore fans and collectors can scour Amazon, eBay, and Craigslist for any of those versions and browse page after page of listings, giving them plenty of time to find the best deal on MK games and merchandise.

Mortal Kombat Nitro will never appear in those listings. Only two copies exist, and their owners have no plans to part with them.

Over the winter and spring of 1993, Sculptured Software and Acclaim struggled to meet Nintendo’s stringent demands for a sanitized version of Mortal Kombat on Super NES. By release, blood had been changed to sweat, and tamer finishing moves had replaced their grisly arcade counterparts. Early on, however, the Super NES port looked markedly different.

“There were versions from Sculptured that had blood,” says Rob Holmes.

Jeff Peters was the project manager at Sculptured Software charged with leading a small team in converting the arcade game to the 16-bit console. While he understood Nintendo looking out for its family-friendly reputation, he thought MK’s violence wasn’t worth all the fuss.

“The blood and guts were so over the top that they were cartoonish,” says Peters.

While Sculptured Software’s engineers translated the arcade version’s code to the Super Nintendo and their artists processed characters and arenas, Peters spent much of his time on the phone. He would show the latest builds to managers at Acclaim, who sent them to Nintendo for approval. Nintendo would get back to Acclaim, and Acclaim would pass their feedback to Peters, who shared it with the team. Unsurprisingly, most approvals failed to meet Nintendo’s standards. What frustrated Peters was that Nintendo provided little guidance. “As we got the game up and running, we would have to test the fence. Is this blood toned down enough? No? Okay, is this toned down enough?”

After several rounds of back-and-forth, Peters gave Nintendo what they wanted. “We’d say, ‘What if it’s sweat flying off? We’d just make the blood translucent.’ And Nintendo was like, ‘Oh. Yeah.’”

“If you think about it,” says Holmes, “the blood is still there. It’s just gray sweat, or fairy dust, or whatever you want to call it.”

Gray blood, jokingly called sweat by the developers, was deemed permissible so long as gobs of the stuff didn’t splatter over the ground the way it did in the arcade. Sculptured reworked the sweat so it sprayed into the air and then dissipated. Nintendo also established a guideline for fatalities.

“They turned around to us and said, ‘Okay, no blood, and no decapitation,’” says James Fink, product tester at Acclaim.

Banning decapitations meant new fatalities for Sub-Zero, Johnny Cage, and Raiden. Fink and the team at Sculptured brainstormed ideas for new finishers. They had no time to make new graphics. That meant recycling animation frames. Instead of blasting his opponent’s head off with a bolt of lightning, Raiden pumps electricity into them until their skeleton disintegrates into a pile of ash with the skull resting on top. To replace Sub-Zero’s iconic spine rip, the developers created a sequence where the ninja freezes opponents and shatters into chunks of ice.

“It was more of an insult to the defeated player when you do that stupid backhand move and shatter them,” says Fink, who was annoyed at Nintendo’s insistence on watering down content.

Before Nintendo insisted on removing blood and sanitizing fatalities, the team at Sculptured had thought up a revised finisher for Johnny Cage that was arguably better than the one Midway had given him. Rather than punching his opponent’s head off their shoulders, he kicks them through their chest hard enough to send blood, bones, and their liver—”that’s what some blobs looked like,” Peters says of the gore—exploding out of their backs. “It’s a good example of what a fatality was before it had to go through Nintendo’s sanitizing machine.”

Nintendo rejected the finisher. Developers at Sculptured and Acclaim threw up their hands — Nintendo had only said no decapitations — but did what was expected and removed the gore. In the final version, Cage kicks his foot through his opponent’s chest and watches as they squirm at the end of his leg. Same animations, squeaky-clean results.

After uploading the latest build for Acclaim — which took forever to send over modem — Acclaim called Peters to report that Nintendo had rejected the game again. “They came back to us like a half-hour later said, ‘Oh, by the way, we need you to take out Kano’s heart fatality,’” Fink says.

That posed a problem for Sculptured and Acclaim. “We didn’t have time to create a new fatality, or we wouldn’t have met the deadline for Mortal Monday,” Fink says. In the final product, Kano tears something out of his opponent’s chest, but what that something is, is open to interpretation. According to Fink, it’s a heart that Sculptured’s artists painted gray. Nintendo gave their consent, and the game was ready for manufacturing.

As frustrating as they found jumping through Nintendo’s hoops, Acclaim and Sculptured Software knew they had no choice but to comply. “They could fail your game if they didn’t like what was in it,” Peters says.

No one at Sculptured or Acclaim was surprised when the Genesis version outsold the Super Nintendo port nearly five to one. But there was another, less publicized reason players preferred Mortal Kombat on Sega’s platform.

Sculptured’s port went through hell during its short span of time in development. Early on, one programmer claimed he could code a one-to-one conversion of the arcade game with no help. Months passed before it became obvious he was in over his head. Now even more pressed for time, Peters put three programmers on the project. Along the way, the code responsible for handling player input and referencing which animations to call got mangled. The result was a control scheme that was borderline unresponsive. When you tap up to jump, your character stands there as if no button was pressed. You have to press hard or hold buttons down for the game to acknowledge them.

Fink ground his teeth every time he read a review criticizing the Super NES’s port’s controls. He wasn’t angry with them for knocking his favorite game. He was angry because he knew they were right.

“It didn’t play like that originally,” he says. “It actually played, in all honesty, closer to the arcade than the Genesis version.”

What really bothered Fink was that the Super Nintendo’s graphics were much closer to the arcade than Sega’s. If not for Nintendo’s restrictions and the port’s flawed code, the Super NES would have hosted the best port, no contest.

Fink took this complaint to Rob Holmes and suggested a way to make things right. “I said, ‘Listen, I’ve got this idea. Street Fighter II got Street Fighter II Turbo. Let’s make Mortal Kombat Nitro.’”

Holmes liked the idea, and he thought Nintendo would like it, too. Mortal Kombat was selling so well on Genesis that Nintendo was slowly losing ground they had gained by securing exclusive rights to the first home adaptation of Street Fighter II. Nintendo had already relented and informed Acclaim they would allow blood in ports of the next Mortal Kombat. An updated version of MK with all the blood and the original fatalities would delight fans, which would please Nintendo.

Fink corrected him. He wasn’t proposing a clone of the arcade game. That was just a starting point. He envisioned more blood, more fatalities, more costumes, and tons of new features. Holmes told him to document his ideas. Ecstatic, Fink returned got to work on his design pitch. “At the time as a 21-year-old kid, I wasn’t the CEO of a company, but that I got green-lit on this, I was like, ‘All right, finally, I can make the game the way it should be.’”

Outlining Mortal Kombat Nitro was easy. Street Fighter II’s first upgrade, Champion Edition, had added the previously unplayable boss characters to the roster. Nitro would do the same by making Goro and Shang Tsung playable. Reptile would join the lineup, too, and he’d possess all of Scorpion’s and Sub-Zero’s special moves and move twice as fast, just as he did when under the AI’s control. Fink understood the appeal of secret characters—players were still dissecting the arcade and home versions to uncover anything else Ed Boon and John Tobias may have hidden away—so he knew he couldn’t make Reptile playable without adding a new hidden character to replace him. His suggestion was the original Kung Lao, Liu Kang’s ancestor, who had defeated Shang Tsung 500 years earlier only to be slain by Goro, who became the reigning champion.

The biggest change would be players’ ability to take their character down light or dark paths in the tournament. If you choose a “good” character such as Sonya or Liu Kang, and only kill “bad” characters such as Kano, you’ll unlock a new costume reflecting your alignment. Kill other good characters, and you’ll turn evil.

“So, for example, Sonya is given the opportunity to kill good characters, but if she does, she gets a bad ending. But if she just kills Kano, who was her target, you’d get the good ending,” Fink says.

Acclaim approached Midway with Fink’s design for Mortal Kombat Nitro. Releasing an upgrade was doable on a technical level: Sculptured had archived versions with blood instead of sweat, and they could reinstate fatality animations such as Johnny Cage’s gorier chest kick. Fink had an artist draft sketches showing characters in new outfits based on good and evil alignments: a blood-red scorpion, Cage wearing golden pants. Before long, Sculptured Software had a prototype where players could choose Reptile or the two bosses. It was glitchy, but it was playable.

Before Nitro progressed further, Midway told Acclaim and Sculptured Software to halt development. The notion of anyone creating a sequel or upgrade to their game was a nonstarter for Boon and Tobias. Acclaim’s bosses backed down without a fight. It was early 1994, and Mortal Kombat II was bringing in millions of dollars in quarters; soon, it would be time for Acclaim, Sculptured Software, and Probe to tackle conversions.

“They were afraid that by the time MK Nitro came out, the sales would interfere with MKII,” Fink says.

Fink disagreed. Casual players would buy home versions, but as a diehard arcade rat, he believed hardcore MKII fans would stick to the arcade’s superior hardware regardless of a home port’s availability. Bob Picunko, who had spearheaded Mortal Monday’s campaign and was already wading through the early stages of MKII’s marketing campaign, saw things differently. Sculptured had worked until their deadline on the first MK. Assuming MKII’s Super NES conversion was just as stressful, they would need to devote every spare minute to coding, debugging, and approvals.

“The issue was, could we really compromise Mortal Kombat II by taking the development team to make a half-step version of the first game?” Picunko says. “Also, would a consumer who bought MK1 buy Nitro, plus another game coming out right after it?”

Both perspectives had merit. The most devoted MK fans who only had a Super Nintendo and were disappointed with their toned-down experience probably would have leaped at the chance to buy a better version. After all, the most impassioned Street Fighter II players dropped cash on every update. However, sales history showed that most consumers weren’t thrilled at paying another $60 to $80 for new versions.

When Capcom’s fiscal year ended in March 1993, it had sold 6.5 million copies of SFII for Nintendo’s 16-bit machine, the first appearance of the game at home, and Capcom’s most successful single-platform release of all time as of 2022. Street Fighter II Turbo for Super Nintendo added more characters, more special moves, and speedier fighting, but topped out at 4.1 million. Super Street Fighter II, the franchise’s last release on Super Nintendo, only sold two million. On Sega Genesis, Street Fighter II: Special Champion Edition—the equivalent of SFII Turbo—came in last at 1.65 million.

The numbers told the story. Some MK fans would add Nitro to their collection, but not enough to risk affecting Mortal Kombat II.

“To this day, I believe Mortal Kombat II on Super Nintendo is the best home version of that game,” Picunko says. “That game probably would not have been as good if the developers would have had to work on an in-between version.”

Fink still believes in Nitro’s design and owns one of two chips containing Nitro’s code. His copy has blood, Kano’s original heart-rip fatality, and Cage’s chest kick complete with blood and guts. Years later, he gave the other ROM chip, which contained more playable characters, to a friend from Midway. “I still have one, which is very wonky, and one that I gave to Ed Boon,” Fink says. “He might have lost it by now. Who knows? This was almost 30 years ago.”

This excerpt is from Long Live Mortal Kombat: Round 1. Written by David L. Craddock, it goes behind the scenes to reveal untold stories from the franchise’s arcade era. The book will be released on October 8, and is available for pre-order on Amazon and from the publisher.

According to Martin Luiga, an editor on ZA/UM's Disco Elysium, key members of the company, including lead writer and designer Robert Kurvitz, writer Helen Hindpere, and lead of art and design Aleksander Rostov, have left the company in an "involuntary" manner.

Luiga shared the update on Medium.com, saying that he, a "founding member and Secretary of the ZA/UM cultural association, as well as the assembler of most of the core team, am hereby dissolving the ZA/UM cultural association." Luiga also notes that these three core members had not been working at ZA/UM "since the end of last year and their leaving the company was involuntary." Furthermore, he says this would "seem like bad news for the loving fans that are waiting for the Disco sequel."

The ZA/UM cultural association is different from the studio ZA/UM that developed Disco Elysium, and Luiga says that he chose to dissolve the cultural organization as it "no longer represents the ethos it was founded on."

"People and ideas are meant to be eternal; organizations may well be temporary," Luiga continued. "I find that the organization was successful overall and most of the mistakes that were made were contingent, determined by the sociocultural conditions we were thrown into. I still encourage people to organize, and I would say that one of the qualities that the ZA/UM cultural organization sorely lacked was pretty much any formal structure. For a while, it was beautiful. My sincerest thanks to all that have rooted for us."

In the comments of the post, Luiga appears to place some of the blame for this situation on the investors of ZA/UM while also admitting Disco Elysium may not have happened without them in the first place.

"Imagine a kleptomaniac, if you will," Luiga said. "Only that instead of stealing, say, 'A Lolly pop,' they take pains to manipulate dozens of people to steal, in the end, from themselves, just because they happen to be very proficient in that kind of an operation. It's what they always do, really. One of them was the first guy to be convicted for investment fraud in Estonia. All the same, idk if we would have managed to get the initial investment without these people."

While this may not be the best news for those waiting on the sequel to Disco Elysium, Luiga wrote on Twitter that he believes "things with the sequel are actually sweet enough, you might even get it the way it was meant, it might take a shit ton of time but RPG fans are sorta accustomed to waiting, ain't they."

In our rare 10/10 review of Disco Elysium - The Final Cut, we said that it is a "unique blend of noir-detective fiction, traditional pen-and-paper RPGs, and a large helping of existentialist theory," and the Final Cut elevates the game from "an already phenomenal RPG to a true must-play masterpiece."

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

According to Martin Luiga, an editor on ZA/UM's Disco Elysium, key members of the company, including lead writer and designer Robert Kurvitz, writer Helen Hindpere, and lead of art and design Aleksander Rostov, have left the company in an "involuntary" manner.

Luiga shared the update on Medium.com, saying that he, a "founding member and Secretary of the ZA/UM cultural association, as well as the assembler of most of the core team, am hereby dissolving the ZA/UM cultural association." Luiga also notes that these three core members had not been working at ZA/UM "since the end of last year and their leaving the company was involuntary." Furthermore, he says this would "seem like bad news for the loving fans that are waiting for the Disco sequel."

The ZA/UM cultural association is different from the studio ZA/UM that developed Disco Elysium, and Luiga says that he chose to dissolve the cultural organization as it "no longer represents the ethos it was founded on."

"People and ideas are meant to be eternal; organizations may well be temporary," Luiga continued. "I find that the organization was successful overall and most of the mistakes that were made were contingent, determined by the sociocultural conditions we were thrown into. I still encourage people to organize, and I would say that one of the qualities that the ZA/UM cultural organization sorely lacked was pretty much any formal structure. For a while, it was beautiful. My sincerest thanks to all that have rooted for us."

In the comments of the post, Luiga appears to place some of the blame for this situation on the investors of ZA/UM while also admitting Disco Elysium may not have happened without them in the first place.

"Imagine a kleptomaniac, if you will," Luiga said. "Only that instead of stealing, say, 'A Lolly pop,' they take pains to manipulate dozens of people to steal, in the end, from themselves, just because they happen to be very proficient in that kind of an operation. It's what they always do, really. One of them was the first guy to be convicted for investment fraud in Estonia. All the same, idk if we would have managed to get the initial investment without these people."

While this may not be the best news for those waiting on the sequel to Disco Elysium, Luiga wrote on Twitter that he believes "things with the sequel are actually sweet enough, you might even get it the way it was meant, it might take a shit ton of time but RPG fans are sorta accustomed to waiting, ain't they."

In our rare 10/10 review of Disco Elysium - The Final Cut, we said that it is a "unique blend of noir-detective fiction, traditional pen-and-paper RPGs, and a large helping of existentialist theory," and the Final Cut elevates the game from "an already phenomenal RPG to a true must-play masterpiece."

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

With no new Star Wars movies on the immediate horizon, Hasbro has been betting big on the various Disney+ shows as it continues to expand the Star Wars: The Black Series line. That trend continues with the first wave of figures inspired by Star Wars: Andor.

Hasbro gave collectors their first look at the new Andor line during their Pulse Con livestream, and IGN can exclusively debut the official images for all four. Get a closer look in the slideshow gallery below:

This wave is focused on the heroes of this surprisingly dark but excellent Star Wars series, including Cassian himself along with Bix Caleen, Luthen Rael and Mon Mothma. All are designed in the typical Black Series six-inch scale and include various accessories.

These Andor figures are priced at $24.99 each and are slated for release in Summer 2023. All four will be available for preorder on the Hasbro Pulse website beginning at 3pm PT on October 1. You can also find Amazon preorder links for all four figures below:

Hasbro Pulse Con also gave us our first look at the new Indiana Jones: The Adventure Series line, with the first wave of figures focusing on the heroes and villains of Raiders of the Lost Ark. You can also check out Hasbro's recently revealed The Mandalorian: Season 2 figures.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.

With no new Star Wars movies on the immediate horizon, Hasbro has been betting big on the various Disney+ shows as it continues to expand the Star Wars: The Black Series line. That trend continues with the first wave of figures inspired by Star Wars: Andor.

Hasbro gave collectors their first look at the new Andor line during their Pulse Con livestream, and IGN can exclusively debut the official images for all four. Get a closer look in the slideshow gallery below:

This wave is focused on the heroes of this surprisingly dark but excellent Star Wars series, including Cassian himself along with Bix Caleen, Luthen Rael and Mon Mothma. All are designed in the typical Black Series six-inch scale and include various accessories.

These Andor figures are priced at $24.99 each and are slated for release in Summer 2023. All four will be available for preorder on the Hasbro Pulse website beginning at 3pm PT on October 1. You can also find Amazon preorder links for all four figures below:

Hasbro Pulse Con also gave us our first look at the new Indiana Jones: The Adventure Series line, with the first wave of figures focusing on the heroes and villains of Raiders of the Lost Ark. You can also check out Hasbro's recently revealed The Mandalorian: Season 2 figures.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.

The Indiana Jones franchise has never been nearly as well represented on the collectibles scene as Star Wars, but Hasbro is looking to change that in 2023. During Hasbro's Pulse Con livestream, the company gave collectors a first look at the Indiana Jones: The Adventure Series line.

Similar to Star Wars: The Black Series, these Adventures Series figures are six-inch scale figures that emphasize both articulation and movie-accurate likenesses. This new line will draw from all corners of the franchise's 40-year history, but fittingly, the inaugural wave will focus on the heroes and villains of 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark.

IGN can exclusively debut images of all six figures in this Raiders wave, which includes Indy himself along with Marion Ravenwood, Sallah, Major Arnold Toht and Rene Belloq. Gaze into the slideshow gallery below, but try not to melt your face off in the process:

Not only do these figures come with all the laundry list of accessories (including an incredible alternate head sculpt for Major Toht), each comes with "Build an Artifact" pieces. Collecting the entire wave allows you to assemble a scale-model Ark of the Covenant and really take the collection up a notch.

The Adventure Series marks the first new line of Indiana Jones figures since 2008, when Hasbro debuted a line of 3 3/4-inch figures to coincide with the release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Sadly, that sequel didn't leave Indy fans much in the mood for buying toys, and the toy line met a premature end. Hopefully the upcoming Indiana Jones 5 will have the opposite effect.

All five figures are priced at $24.99 each and are slated for release in Spring 2023. The Indy and Major Toht figures will be available for preorder beginning at 3pm PT on the Hasbro Pulse website, and you can also find Amazon preorder links below. The remaining three figures will go up for preorder at a later date.

In other toy news, IGN recently got a first look at NECA's new Shredder figure inspired by the original TMNT comics.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.