Until recently, I’d never stopped to think about all the eccentric conversions that made up so much of my early gaming life. And yet they’re – you can’t talk about console history without dwelling on the arcade ports that propped up the back catalogues of the NES, SNES, Mega Drive – indeed, any piece of hardware you care to name.
And these things are , sometimes falling well short of the mark, sometimes coming up with ingenious solutions to squeeze an all-singing, all-dancing arcade game down on to more humble machinery, and sometimes – just sometimes – earning the mantle ‘arcade perfect’.
David L. Craddock, a prolific author and historian, has recently compiled a fascinating account of the history of arcade ports in Arcade Perfect: How Pac-Man, Mortal Kombat, and Other Coin-Op Classics Invaded the Living Room – which is out right now. It’s a brilliantly detailed read, allowing us to hear first-hand reports on the trials and tricks of those who were often tasked with the impossible. I got to have a quick chat with David for an oversight on the book, and some of the stories contained within (and, of course, if you want to read them in full you’ll have to pick a copy up for yourself).
I’ll start with the term arcade perfect, which is of course the premise of the book and the title itself. It’s a term you don’t get banded around so much these days. What does it mean to you?
David L. Craddock: You’re right, it’s a term we don’t hear so often these days and I kind of missed it. Back in the days of 8 and 16-bit consoles, especially 16-bit and 32-bit, arcade perfect meant this port of an arcade game was as close to 1:1, as close to the arcade game to be identical. As a kid it was really important to me – you only have one system, and playing into the console wars era, you hoped to get the best version. And as a kid, sometimes I did – I had Street Fighter 2 for SNES, but I had Mortal Kombat for SNES and that version wasn’t as good as the Mega Drive version as that had blood and all the fatalities. It’s just something that interested me, and as I got older I was less interested in ‘winning’ as I was curious in an academic sense on the differences. Why did the Mega Drive version look different?