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Why Did the Genesis Mortal Kombat Outsell the SNES Version?

Players bought the version that let them turn the arcade game back on.

On paper the SNES version should have won. Its picture and sound were closer to the arcade. What it did not have was the game people had queued for in arcades: Nintendo had the blood recoloured to sweat and the Fatalities rewritten, permanently, with no way back. The Genesis version shipped tame too, rated MA-13, but the arcade violence was sitting in the code, one well publicised cheat away.

That difference, not hardware loyalty, is the explanation every contemporary account points to. This page also separates the documented size of the win from the numbers that grew in retelling.

THE GENESIS COVER

The box that carried the rating
Mortal Kombat US Genesis cover
United States, Genesis
The Genesis box, published by Arena. Note the MA-13 rating from Sega's Videogame Rating Council in the corner: the rating the uncensored code sat behind.

THE CODE

ABACABB
Seven buttons
At the Genesis version's Code of Honor screen, entering A, B, A, C, A, B, B restored the blood and the uncensored Fatalities. The sequence spells ABACABB, a nod to Abacab, the 1981 album by the band Genesis, who shared their name with the console in North America.
A rating with a back door
As shipped, the Genesis game carried Sega's MA-13 label from its Videogame Rating Council. Sega could present a rated, toned down product to parents and politicians, while every magazine and playground passed the code to the players.
Word of mouth as marketing
The code was well published, which was the point. Owning the Genesis version meant owning the real arcade game after thirty seconds of button presses. Owning the SNES version meant owning the edited one forever.

THE DOCUMENTED GAP

What the record supports
Five to one
The history of the 1993 to 1994 Senate hearings records that Sega's version of Mortal Kombat outsold Nintendo's by a factor of five. SYFY Wire's account of the SNES launch gives the same figure: the Genesis version outsold the Super Nintendo version five to one.
The year's biggest console game
In the United States, the Genesis version was the overall best selling console game of 1993. By 2000 the home versions had sold 6.5 million cartridges in total, with the Genesis version accounting for the majority of sales.
Mortal Monday scale
Acclaim announced in November 1993 that it had shipped more than three million copies across the SNES, Genesis, Game Boy and Game Gear versions combined, and the game sold three million copies worldwide in its first three weeks. The Genesis win happened inside a launch that was already enormous.

THE NUMBERS THAT GREW

Lore, labelled as lore

Ask around and you will hear other ratios. Three to one and four to one both circulate widely, and a GameFAQs trivia entry, for example, states a 4 to 1 ratio as part of an anecdote about Ed Boon predicting the result. That entry cites no source for its figure. No source opened for this page documents three to one or four to one with sales data behind it, while five to one is the ratio carried by both the hearings history and the SYFY account. The honest sentence is: Genesis outsold SNES by a wide, documented factor of five, and smaller round numbers in retellings should be treated as folklore.

The mechanism, at least, is not folklore. GamePro's contemporary verdict, quoted by SYFY Wire, was that although the graphics did not live up to the SNES, the great gameplay, the better control and the special blood enabling option made the Genesis cartridge the winner. Electronic Gaming Monthly scored the ports the same way, 8.25 out of 10 for Genesis against 7.25 for SNES.

And the control experiment already happened. A year later Mortal Kombat II arrived on the SNES uncensored, with the ESRB in place, and the SNES version outsold the Genesis version. Remove the censorship, and the Genesis advantage disappeared with it.

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