Midway Games

» see midway.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

midway was the logo on a lot of the cabinets in the cafes i used to sit in. mortal kombat 2 was the one. the cabinet was bootleg, the rom was burnt to a jamma board nobody had paid midway for, but the splash screen still said midway right under williams electronics. the company name on the screen was a thing you read for the half-second before you put your tokens in.

this part i was not really close to. midway was founded in 1958 in chicago as midway manufacturing, a coin-op amusement-game maker on the same lake michigan industrial corridor as williams electronics and bally. bally bought midway in 1969. in 1980 midway took the us license for namco's pac-man and the company ran the most-recognizable arcade brand of the decade. defender, joust, spy hunter, rampage, ms. pac-man came through the same pipeline.

williams electronics and bally midway merged in 1988, the consumer arcade business was spun off as wms industries, and midway games inc was carved out of that as a separate publicly traded company in 1996. mortal kombat 3 was shipping that year, the studio in chicago had moved to twenty-four-megabit cartridges and the console ports were on snes and genesis. nba jam tournament edition was on the same release calendar. there was about a five-year window where midway was running both the coin-op and the home-cartridge sides of the same handful of titles, that was its peak.

the long descent was slower. the n64 and ps1 era took a lot of the arcade audience home, midway shipped cruis'n usa and mortal kombat 4 and ready 2 rumble boxing through the late nineties but the coin-op category itself was shrinking. by the mid-2000s the company was a console-only publisher with a thin catalog. mortal kombat deception and armageddon kept selling but the business never recovered the margin. midway filed chapter 11 on february 12 2009. warner bros bought the catalog including the mortal kombat ip on july 10 2009 for thirty-three million dollars.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the arcade era ~

the mortal kombat run was the part that stuck. ed boon and john tobias built the first mortal kombat in chicago in 1992 on a digitized-actor pipeline that no other fighting game was using at the time. real actors on bluescreen, motion captured frame-by-frame, the fatalities were a separate animation pass. street fighter ii was the dominant arcade fighter that year. midway shipped mortal kombat into the same cabinets and the fatalities moral panic in the us senate hearings of 1993 turned the brand into a household name in the way no other midway title had been.

nba jam in 1993 was the other side of the same era. mark turmell on the design side, the same digitized-player style midway had built for mortal kombat. boomshakalaka, on fire, two-on-two, the rosters were licensed from the nba directly. it was the highest-grossing arcade game of 1993 and 1994 by some estimates. the home port on genesis sold around two million units. nfl blitz followed the same template a few years later.

~ the actual end ~

the corporate side of the wind-down was a slow squeeze. sumner redstone (the viacom chairman) owned around eighty-seven percent of midway by 2008 through national amusements. in november 2008 redstone sold the entire stake to a private investor named mark thomas for one hundred dollars plus assumption of seventy million dollars in debt. the move shifted the tax loss to a buyer rather than retaining it inside national amusements. midway then filed chapter 11 on february 12 2009.

warner bros bid thirty-three million dollars for the catalog and the mortal kombat development team in the chicago suburb of chicago. that purchase closed on july 10 2009. the chicago studio became netherrealm studios under ed boon, still inside the warner bros games umbrella, and shipped mortal kombat 9 in 2011 as the reboot. most of the rest of the catalog (cruis'n, rampage, spy hunter, rampage, joust) sat dormant inside wb games and surfaces in occasional licensed re-releases.

~ the long tail ~

mortal kombat 1 (the 2023 reboot, not the 1992 original) shipped from the same chicago team that midway had built. the studio building in chicago is still there. the midway logo is gone from any active product, the brand sits in the same warner bros vault as gauntlet and joust and rampage. wb has used the catalog for the occasional collection re-release on switch and ps5, the recent mortal kombat games are netherrealm-branded rather than midway-branded.

the cabinets are the thing that survived. mortal kombat 2 and nba jam are still in barcade and arcade-revival spaces in 2026, mostly running on jamma boards rather than original midway hardware. mame emulates the catalog cleanly. the chicago workshop where pac-man cabinets were stamped is gone, the production line itself ended in the late nineties when wms got out of the coin-op manufacturing business.

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