What 10 Great Video Games Look Like Without Visual Effects

1. Mortal Kombat

From the latest cutting-edge tech to the oldest game on this list, creating the original Mortal Kombat looks like a crazy process in 2020. Back when that seminal fighter came came out, the devs opted to swap out the colourful sprites of Street Fighter for realistic character models that were actually FMV recordings of real people performing the moves.

As you can imagine, that process was a little rudimentary, and essentially amounted to a bunch of people being suited up in ninja costumes, pushed to the back of a dingy office, and forced to perform punches, kicks, and fatalities against a wall.

What's fascinating is that there was only a tiny space the actors could perform in to make sure their characters didn't take up too much space in the game, and thus some of the more agile moves had to be pieced together in imaginative ways. Running attacks, for instance, were filmed with the actors on a treadmill, while jumping kicks had the fighters balancing on portable stairs.

In way, it's not too different to how performance capture is filmed now, only on a massively downscaled level.