Hello everybody and welcome to one of our irregular special podcasts and interview with returning guest friend of the show. I think this is the fifth time we've spoken, possibly. It's author David L. Craddock. Welcome back. Thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure. We've spoken about your books on Quake and Matters. We've

spoken about Blizzard, Blizzard games. We've spoken about classic Golden Age coin ops, and we've spoken

about X-Com. But now, here we are again. So what's the subject? What's the topic?

Well, it's funny, I was going to say almost to this point, I think the list of topics we haven't discussed might be shorter than those we have.

But I found one, it is Mortal Kombat. The subject of my next book trilogy of books is the not only the making of the mortal combat games which is kind of my

wheelhouse but as we'll get more into celebrating the fan community of mortal combat and the

trilogy is called long live mortal combat which i feel kind of embodies that that spirit yeah so

it's uh you're obviously talking about a franchise that is still going strong to this day with mk11

and it's uh it's ultimate version that's uh that's still a present on many people's hard drives i

imagine but of course the book being uh being one of your projects goes all the way back and in fact goes back to prior to the beginning

of Mortal Kombat and actually starts with some solid history on Midway and their role

in the golden age of arcades.

Yeah, I wanted to start there just because I, one thing I like to do with these books is, as much as I like technology and games, I really consider them a stage for people, the real players in these productions to kind of live their lives.

And they're the reason that we care about the stage in the first place.

So I wanted to go back and tell a little bit of Midway's history before they acquired,

before Williams acquired Midway and they rebranded their video department, as they called it,

Midway, to kind of learn about the foundation they were built on, which was pinball,

because Ed Boone, co-creator

Mortal Kombat, has a background in pinball specifically.

Yeah, so what do you think was, yeah, it's weird because now it seems like there was no

time at all looking back really between the golden age of video games.

If we're talking about Defender and Robotron in the early, their output, Williams' output in the early 80s,

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