Over the years, Mortal Kombat spawned many arcade imitators. While some persisted, none of them had its staying power. Despite amounting to a footnote in gaming history, Atari Games' Primal Rage remains a memorable attempt to replicate MK's success. The two games are intertwined by more than just violent spectacle, though, and one's fate may be directly linked to the other.

Primal Rage was released in arcades in 1994. The game's cast put a novel twist on the fighting game genre. Its seven playable characters consist of a giant ape and dinosaur gods representing two different factions, the Sacred and the Occult. Awakened by a meteor, they fight for control of post-apocalyptic "Urth."

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Like Mortal Kombat, Primal Rage featured digitized fighters instead of the sprites and polygons of competitors like Street Fighter and Tekken. Unlike MK, Primal Rage's fighters weren't martial artists and actors performing the character's moves. They were airbrushed armature models brought to life by stop motion animation. The game also featured blood and finishing moves similar to MK's, with the ability to attack and eat rival gods' worshipers adding to the carnage.

As you might expect from a game that was functionally a Godzilla vs. Kong fighter, Primal Rage was a success. Atari declared it 1994's top arcade game on the cover of its home releases. The game was ported to nearly every active platform at the time, from the Sony PlayStation to the Sega Game Gear. It even had a Tiger Electronics handheld version. It was also heavily merchandised, with toys, comics, and novels based on the game. It was an animated series and live-action movie away from being a true multimedia franchise like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. Primal Rage II was greenlit but never officially released, but not for lack of effort on Atari Games' part.

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As recently detailed by YouTuber Matt McMuscles, Primal Rage 2's development was difficult. On top of how lengthy stop motion animation is to create, the developers overhauled many features for the sequel based on feedback to the original arcade version. They also heavily tweaked the game's core premise.

The biggest change came in the form of the game's cast. Gigantic humans called Avatars would serve as stand-ins for the original's gods, whom they could transform into for Super Moves. Skeletal dragon Necrosan, scrapped from the original, would debut as the series' first final boss. He asserted his authority in the game's story by banishing the gods, forcing them to find a loophole to fight against him. To not alienate fans of the original, the gods were still playable. The Super Move dynamic was reversed in their case, allowing the gods to transform into their human Avatars briefly. Beyond not completely invalidating the original's main appeal, it also beefed up the number of playable characters to 17, but the increased roster proved to be a problem. The amount of animation for every character required a large amount of data, forcing the team to develop on specialized hardware, making lucrative console ports prohibitively difficult at best.

The arcade version was intended for release in the summer of 1996. The time sink of creating new character models, 5-7 months from concept art to implementation with little room for error, made that a pipe dream. It was sent to arcades for market feedback in an incomplete, bug-riddled state, but the developers believed they'd be able to create whip it into arcade-worthy shape eventually.

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Primal Rage fighting avatars

Corporate machinations proved to be more brutal than a fatality for Primal Rage. The owners of Mortal Kombat's parent company Midway, WMS Industries, purchased Atari Games in April 1996. McMuscles put forth the theory that WMS bought Atari to eliminate a competitor, with mass firings of Atari staff as a prime example.

Primal Rage was redundant to a company that produced Mortal Kombat and Killer Instinct arcade games. That message was sent to the developers when a request to use MK characters in PR 2 was denied. The game's prolonged development and lack of port prospects likely didn't improve its standing with its new owners. It was canceled by the end of 1996.

Over the years, Primal Rage 2 did get two unofficial releases in recent years. Illinois' Galloping Ghost Arcade acquired a cabinet of the nearly finished game in 2014, while an emulated version was made available via a modified version of MAME in 2017. Outside of a cameo in Mortal Kombat 11, current license holder Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment hasn't done anything with the property despite the public's enduring love of kaiju fights.

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