Everything that came out of Williams/Midway for example (From Defender all the way to Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, Crusin', basically everything not on PC-based hardware) were all completely done in assembly. Wrap your noggin around that one.
Yeah, but generally arcade games tend to be a lot simpler than some of the more complex offerings on SNES, say. The systems were more powerful, but the gameplay itself tended to be simpler, owing as much to the need to play for quarter increments as anything. Less state to keep track of, generally, at the very least.
Remember that 20 years ago, before the era of superpowerful consoles, arcade titles usually pushed the state of the art in game mechanics and graphics. Home consoles could benefit from longer gameplay, but that usually came from larger game maps and way too many boss screens.
And...weren't some of the most popular SNES games ports of popular arcade titles?
Sure. But graphics and basic game mechanics are actually really easy to code in assembly -- it's crazy state and decisions that get way more difficult. I'd bet coding up a triangle rasterizer would be significantly easier than coding up a cutscene.
And...weren't some of the most popular SNES games ports of popular arcade titles?
Yes! Street Fighter II (and sequels). The Mortal Kombat series. These were HUGE when they arrived on the SNES. I still remember how amazing it was when SF2 came out.
What were the development cycles for those later arcade games? How long did it take to build Mortal Kombat and how many people did they have working on it?
I should've looked at Wikipedia first, it answered part of my question.
"The first Mortal Kombat game was 4 guys, literally, one programmer, myself (Boon), two graphics guys (Tobias and Vogel), and a sound guy (Forden) was the entire team, literally"
In those days it took about a year, maybe a year and a half.
Many teams would carry a core "operating system" (really a library of system routines/process scheduler/IO/audits) from game to game and build off of that. That left more time to write the game mechanics and choreography.
Was it motion capture (driving a 3D model from sensors) or was it video capture (making sprites from videos). I believe it was the latter. MK's photographic realism really made it stand out in the arcade.
The team switched from digitized actors to motion capture technology (the quote is incorrectly referring to Midway as Acclaim): "To make the characters in video games more realistic, actors are being recruited to serve as models. Acclaim, the video-game company that made Mortal Kombat, has created a special 'motion capture studio' for this purpose. A martial-arts expert with as many as 100 electronic sensors taped to his body sends precise readings to a camera as he goes through his moves—running, jumping, kicking, punching. The action is captured, digitized and synthesized into a 'naked' wire-frame model stored in a computer. Those models can then be 'dressed' with clothing, facial expressions and other characteristics by means of a computer technique called texture mapping.
MK1-3 were 2D characters, all done with video capture. MK4 was a 3D camera-based game and was done with motion capture.
There were other 2D fighting games around that time that used video capture (remember Atari Pit Fighter?) but MK avoided the sprite scaling and kept it flat.
I'm pretty sure the original was done by digitising video frames & tidying them up.
There probably weren't many people doing motion capture as we know it today in 1992.
Everything that came out of Williams/Midway for example (From Defender all the way to Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, Crusin', basically everything not on PC-based hardware) were all completely done in assembly. Wrap your noggin around that one.