This. Is. Amazing.
Providing a fascinating behind-the-scenes insight into the making of 1992’s Mortal Kombat, the brutal fighting game that forever changed fighting games, a series of videos have recently surfaced that showcase how the characters were brought to life within the game. As it turns out, a pretty interesting technology was utilized.
Believe it or not, actual actors were brought in to play the likes of Scorpion, Sub Zero and Raiden, and those actors were then digitized into the game. The technique can’t exactly be considered “motion capture” as we know it today, but it was a sort of early version of the technology that’s now used for most video games.
The first game to use true motion capture was Rise of the Robots, released in ’94.
User RambleKhron just uploaded a handful of GIFs from those “mo-cap” sessions to Imgur, taken from longer behind the scenes videos that you can watch below!