How did Midway go from making bank with Mortal Kombat to bankrupt after over 60 years in business?
Matt McMuscles explores what happened to the former Chicago king of arcades
The middle of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 generation saw a large amount of video game developers close their doors or get picked up by a larger corporation, and one of those was of course Midway Games.
Content Creator Matt McMuscles recently released the latest episode in his 'What Happened?' series focusing in on the original home of Mortal Kombat and how they went bankrupt after 64 years in business.
Although they had their start in pinball machines and amusement games in 1958, Midway wouldn't find their first big hit until the '80s when they brought over the arcade phenomenon Space Invaders.
This allowed the company to survive the video game crash of the era and led to their first internally-developed hit in Rampage, and things were looking bright for Midway.
That success and further emphasis on the gaming market brought forth the golden age of Midway in the early '90s with Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam and other titles making a big splash not only in arcades, but on the home consoles as well — except that Acclaim took most of those profits as well as the NBA Jam license.
With the arcade business dying out and consoles becoming king in the latter half of the decade, however, Midway was forced to shift their focus more onto PlayStation and Nintendo, which seemed to work out for a while despite some growing pains.
The turn of the millennium would be the last time the developer and publisher managed to turn a profit though.
For every Mortal Kombat Deception, Midway released 2 or 3 stinkers that would fail to make even a ripple, leading to a loss of over $250 million in just 3 years.
Unfortunately, things would turn even more grim for Midway in the following years with ballooning development costs for the HD era making the flops hurt a lot more.
You can learn more about Midway's final days in business as well as much more about their rise and fall in the latest What Happened below.
