UMK3 - Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 arcade experiences: Wavenet, Rain.
Heyo, with the current mk9 hype and my recent registration to the site, I want to share my experiences with the mk series.
Midway was based out of Chicago. That’s where I grew up. From 92-97 I visited the arcades frequently. I grew up in Rogers Park, a part of the city of Chicago. “Diversions” was the closest, and by far, the largest arcade establishment in the local vicinity. My brother, and about 3 closest buddies walked or biked to Diversions almost daily during the warm months. I was 11 at the time. Occasionally we brought along a few bucks, but usually we went there penniless. Not the best of the Chicago areas; our apartment was broken into twice, and we caught a random fucker at our third event…, but I digress.
Eventually MK3 was released. Ahh good memories. I remember huge mobs of people around the MK3 cabinet on its opening release. I remember myself: a little 12 year old chap dropping my golden token on the cabinet’s TV screen and watching and hearing it quickly slide down the glass. The token would then join an assembly line of at least 10 other tokens, a lengthy queue of a line. Eventually I would get my turn and play with the teen big boys lol, although the players were of diverse ages.
UMK3 and Wavenet followed. Wavenet cabinets were connected by T1 lines throughout participating arcades in the Chicago area. I am not sure whether other states had Wavenet machines. Apparently rumors circulate that the elusive Rain was included in that version. (The SNES port had Rain, maybe Genesis too, but I am discounting those shitty ports).
From my personal experience of actually playing a real Wavenet machine back in t day, I can say that Rain WAS NOT PLAYABLE in that version. You simply chucked down your quarters/tokens hit Start, used to joystick to pick your name, and then you were connected to a live person playing somewhere else in Chicago. I remember picking robo-hobo Smoke and destroying people and getting like 10 wins in a row because a lot of the players did not know how to execute the simple throw prevention inputs (simply hold back/ back+block / down+back / down+back+block for standing/crouching evasion/block. If only they knew they were losing to a Smoke/Kabal/Nightwolf-using 12 year old kid lol.
I apologize for the lengthy post, hope it was informative and possibly cleared up any unanswered questions. One thing to note is that MK was always known to include easter eggs/codes. Perhaps there was some secret code. If there was, I haven’t seen it. I doubt it, however, since the game attracted such massive crowds, at least someone would’ve known. And initially all game info, was shared by word of mouth, which spread faster than information obtained from a gaming magazine. Although, I do remember writing down fatalities and combos from AOL files back in the day and sharing those with 20 yr old dudes lol.
