Mortal Kombat 4 was the 4th installment of the MK series released in 1997. For the first time, developers moved away from digitized sprites (digitised actors filmed against green screens) in MK 1-3 and to motion capture and polygonal modelling. Developers were nervous about making this move. They wanted to keep the Mortal Kombat brand distinct from other games like Virtua Fighter and Tekken, so they kept movement locked to a 2D place while allowing for limited sidestepping.Â
Midway introduced a weapons system, something they likely felt they had to do to keep MK innovative. After 3 installments of a 2D fighting game, it gets increasingly difficult to impress customers.
By the time MK4 had come out for the N64, the PlayStation had also been released, and the PS used CDs for their games. N64 cartridges had less storage space than PS CDs, so voice lines and music tracks were compressed for the Nintendo port. But an advantage of using cartridges was that the load times were much, much faster that PS’s loading time of 10-15 seconds to start a bout.
