Apparently so, as
President/COO of Sega of America,
Bernie Stolar, stated in his
keynote address at the
GDC in San Jose this week. Here's a snippet.
| Right now, worldwide, there are more than 100 companies developing games for the system. At launch, look for Mortal Kombat 5 and Ready to Rumble from Midway, Castlevania from Konami, PowerStone from Capcom and Soul Calibur from Namco. |
It was well known that Midway hired Eurocom to develop a Mortal Kombat title for the Sega Dreamcast. MK4:Dreamcast was going to feature higher polygonal count characters and levels, with a few new exclusives like new characters and levels. Unless Midway took up the development of this title, it's pretty safe to say that this isn't the title to replace the successor to MK4 Arcade. All that was known about the successor to MK4 Arcade was that it was on hold while the MK team helped with the development of MK4:Dreamcast and then venture into a totally non-MK related project using the Zeus II graphics chip. In some early interviews with MK co-creator, Ed Boon, it was stated that MK5 would be using the successor to the Zeus graphics processor in MK4 Arcade. If this indeed is the successor to MK4 Arcade it probably would be too much of a shock to anyone. With the recent technological advances in the home PC and console gaming platforms, arcades are becoming a financial black hole for many. Unfortunately, this means that previous arcade machine developers are having to retool their business model to accomodate these new machines. If there is one thing that Midway knows, it's how to make serious revenue profits with their Mortal Kombat franchise. Midway has never put themselves in a position where they have all of the eggs in one basket. They're very aware of what works with their franchise, and I don't see Midway being in the position to rely on the sales of Sega's latest console. If at all, this will be more than likely an exclusive release on the Dreamcast console followed by other versions on other platforms. Dreamcast is currently the highest performing console slated to be in the market during 1999; however, it's hard to pass up on the Playstation and Nintendo64's install bases, but their hardware is technically inferior compared to the Dreamcast. If it is Midway's plan to make the Dreamcast version of Mortal Kombat the successor to MK4 Arcade, the Dreamcast hardware is certainly capable to handle a game that would have features beyond what MK4 Arcade offered. Of course, that would mean you have to buy a Dreamcast to play the successor to MK4 Arcade, MK5. I hope that this isn't the situation we're going to be faced with come September. Unfortunately, not too many President/COOs make mistakes during keynotes at GDC regarding official release titles for their latest console machine. Thanks to Jason Sizemore and Benjamin Kimble for the heads up.
