Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam
The following excerpt is from "Creating Q*bert and Other Classic Video Arcade Games" by Warren Davis. The book was published January 11, 2022 and is available for purchase on Amazon.
Back at my regular day job, I became particularly fascinated with a new product that came out for the Amiga computer: a video digitizer made by a company called A-Squared. Let’s unpack all that slowly.
The Amiga was a recently released home computer capable of unprecedented graphics and sound: 4,096 colors! Eight-bit stereo sound! There were image manipulation programs for it that could do things no other computer, including the IBM PC, could do. We had one at Williams not only because of its capabilities, but also because our own Jack Haeger, an immensely talented artist who’d worked on Sinistar at Williams a few years earlier, was also the art director for the Amiga design team.
Video digitization is the process of grabbing a video image from some video source, like a camera or a videotape, and converting it into pixel data that a computer system (or video game) could use. A full-color photograph might contain millions of colors, many just subtly different from one another. Even though the Amiga could only display 4,096 colors, that was enough to see an image on its monitor that looked almost perfectly photographic.
Our video game system still could only display 16 colors total. At that level, photographic images were just not possible. But we (and by that I mean everyone working in the video game industry) knew that would change. As memory became cheaper and processors faster, we knew that 256-color systems would soon be possible. In fact, when I started looking into digitized video, our hardware designer, Mark Loffredo, was already playing
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