An arcade expert opens up on being hired by ‘The Last of Us’ to do ‘Mortal Kombat II’ right

wegotthiscovered.com:

You’d think it’d be fairly simple to put Mortal Kombat II in The Last of Us. The arcade cabinet shifted 27,000 units and remains a staple feature of any self-respecting barcade. So, just hire a cabinet, plug it in, and have the actors play during the scene. Well, it turns out the reality was far more complicated.

In a discussion on the Arcade Museum forums, Josh Brown, one of the arcade experts HBO tapped to work on the show, went into detail on exactly how Mortal Kombat II worked on screen, and it’s far, far more involved than we’d ever have dreamed.

One of the major issues is that an original CRT monitor won’t look good when filmed as the refresh rate of the monitor won’t synchronize with the camera. It’s possible to solve this, but in a scene featuring multiple CRTs in the arcade, another solution had to be figured out. As per Brown:

“Inside the Mortal Kombat II cabinet was actually a 46 inch OLED panel that we rotated 90 degrees. The gameplay footage was all played and captured ahead of time by myself while Chance and I worked through the script, making sure we got all the moves down that they wanted to show (fatalities included). I treated the footage with scanlines, some curvature, and rounded the corners off so it looked a little more like a real CRT.

We programmed an interface we could control remotely on the day that would instantly play a clip from the game on demand and basically played it back in real time with the actors as they shot the scene. So when you see them drop one coin in, thats an individual clip, 2nd coin, another clip, character selection, yet another clip and so on.”

Getting this to look right was apparently expensive and time-consuming, though this was an important moment for Ellie and Riley, so