Another awesome find. Loving the production value of the showcase and the theatrics by the game actors.

my god, Kano is tying her up

Love this stuff. I didn't realize how hard they were pushing the kombat codes as a feature to increase profits. For as much as people like to complain about microtransactions in the modern games, it's not as if the arcades were any less rotten.

Here's hoping to seeing The Live Tour recordings surface. I know videos by Fischoff's people exist because he told me and we see the footage in the press materials.

Haven't lost hope. Although it wasn't the copy with the c1994 date, if the 35mm reel teaser for the film and all the TBS premiere spots can surface this late in the game I haven't lost hope.

Making the biggest profit was a huge part of coin-op game development and every time I've heard arcade developers talk about their games, they seem to focus on it. You don't think microtransactions are an evolution of quarter munching arcade machines? Why not?

Having lived back in that day, I know that you only paid to play until you died. And it was a quarter. Arcades were located in public businesses that had business hours, unlike our homes which can provide lengthy gameplay. You had all of the game at your access, you just had to know the secrets and how to unlock them. You never played to enable features already in the game. If any upgrades or addons were available, it was at the expense of the arcade owner, you didn't pay to fight Reptile, you just played against him if you found him.

Although 2 player mode, each player normally played per game, as I said before, everything in the game was already available once you knew the right combinations.

Not saying quarter crunching didn't get expensive, but you could walk away and there wasn't much more to explore except character endings. And you could pick up a cheap book, guide, or magazine for those

Games back then were treated like games. When it was your time to go you could leave and come back (except in the battle plan modes obviously).

Except in this video, which is a demo for coin operators to sign onto MK3 where the guy with the microphone explicitly points out that the buyers who would operate an MK3 machine would receive a ROM swap out which would be end up being UMK3 in a matter of months (due to MK3 getting to home consoles within 5 months or so of the Arcade release) Announcing content that isn't coming out with original game, but being released later on...

It's hard to dispute that this was DLC at its very infancy. A marketing gimmick that doesn't involve online distribution, but a marketing gimmick nonetheless.

UMK3 alongside MKA and DOTR was the start to Mortal Kombat's downfall with that stint, no doubt about it. MK3 should have never been released as it was and UMK3 should have been MK3. If I recall... machine owners, especially businesses, didn't have yo pay for UMK3 but we as consumers did for home consoles.

Still as it was still a scam, an update or upgrade is a far cry from addons.