The two most culturally loaded American games of the early nineties came out of the same building on the West Side of Chicago, thirteen months apart, and both were designed around one constraint: how do you get a teenager to put in another quarter. Mortal Kombat arrived October 8, 1992. NBA Jam followed in 1993. Midway's shop understood something the console business took another decade to learn — that the game is the venue, and the venue is a neighborhood business.
A Chicago manufacturing story
Midway sat inside a coin-op manufacturing tradition that was specifically Chicago's: Bally, Williams, Midway, a pinball-and-jukebox industrial base that predates video games entirely. The Video Game History Foundation's conversation with Josh Tsui — a Midway artist who later directed the Insert Coin documentary — describes a studio culture closer to a machine shop than to a software company.
The documentary itself, covered by The Hollywood Reporter and by the Chicago Sun-Times, lays out the operation: small teams, brutal deadlines, and a design brief dictated by earnings reports from test locations. A cabinet that didn't earn came back off the floor.
Digitized people, digitized city
Mortal Kombat's technique — filming real martial artists and digitizing them into sprites — was partly economics and partly what made it feel dangerous. Ed Boon and John Tobias built a fighting game whose characters looked like people because they were people. NBA Jam, led by Mark Turmell, did the same with NBA players and added the thing that made it immortal: two-on-two, no fouls, a commentator screaming.
NBA Jam's arcade earnings are the stuff of trade-press legend, routinely cited as the highest-grossing coin-op run of its era. It was also, functionally, the first basketball game that felt like playground basketball rather than a simulation of a televised broadcast — a distinction that mattered enormously to who played it and where.
Where the quarters actually went
Here's the part the nostalgia skips. An arcade cabinet was not sold to a player, it was sold to an operator. Route operators bought or leased machines and placed them in bowling alleys, laundromats, corner stores, pizza shops and arcades, then split the coin box with the location owner — commonly around fifty-fifty. Midway sold hardware to distributors; distributors sold to operators; operators and locations split the take.
That chain meant a hit game put real money into small businesses in the neighborhoods where the machines earned best — which, in Chicago and every other American city, included a lot of Black-owned corner stores and barbershops and community spots. The arcade economy was one of the few entertainment businesses of that era where a storefront owner with no industry connection could take a cut of a national hit.
It also meant the earnings were a direct vote. A game lived or died on what the players in those rooms actually fed it. NBA Jam and Mortal Kombat were not focus-grouped in Redmond. They were tuned against coin drops in Chicago rooms.
A 2024 exhibit at the Cleve Carney Museum of Art finally put that history in a museum, which is about thirty years later than it should have happened.
The take
The arcade was the last time the games business had a genuinely decentralized revenue model. Money moved from a kid's pocket to a local operator to a local storefront and only then upstream to a publisher. Console retail flattened that, and digital storefronts removed it entirely — a Fortnite purchase in Englewood clears to one company in North Carolina and one in Seattle, and nothing stays in the neighborhood.
Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam are remembered as design landmarks, and they are. They're also artifacts of a distribution system where Black neighborhoods were revenue participants rather than just an audience segment. The games survived. The economics around them did not, and nothing in the thirty years since has replaced them.
## Sources - Exclusive: 'Insert Coin' Details History Behind 'Mortal Kombat,' 'NBA Jam' Arcade Developer — The Hollywood Reporter - 'Insert Coin' documentary highlights Midway Games' arcade empire — Chicago Sun-Times, November 27, 2020 - Midway Games, as seen by Josh Tsui — Video Game History Foundation - New exhibit showcases Midway Games as an original arcade gaming giant — Chicago Sun-Times, November 5, 2024