It really is a shame that Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection has been more or less abandoned on Steam/PC.
This past weekend, I went to the Houston Arcade Expo for my annual classic arcade gaming fix. While there, I noticed that for the first time they not only had Mortal Kombat II, but the original Mortal Kombat and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 as well. Of course, I had played for several minutes on UMK3 before realizing, “Hey, I could be playing this at home…”
Now, I have Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection for both Xbox 360 and Steam, but my Xbox 360 is currently packed away (more info about that in a later post, hopefully). So, that night, while waiting for friends to be ready to play Team Fortress 2, I plugged in my USB gamepad and launched MKAK for some classic MK action.
That was the plan, anyway. What ended up happening was that the game hung at the title screen; it said “Press Enter”, but completely ignored when I pressed Enter.
After doing some research, I found that the problem was that MKAK requires Games for Windows Live, which Microsoft had ended up abandoning. While many games were patched by their developers to use Steamworks, MKAK was already essentially abandoned by WB Games and was never patched. In fact, MKAK is only available for me because I purchased the game; it’s no longer available on Steam for purchase.
Fortunately, there IS a fix. I mostly got the fix from this guide, though I ended up modifying it via trial and error and looking at one or two other sites as the steps as given don’t work on Windows 10.
The procedure is:
- Go into Apps and Features on Windows 10 (right click on the Start Menu to reach it), and uninstall “Microsoft Games for Windows – LIVE Redistributable” and “Microsoft Games for Windows Marketplace”.
- Reboot your system. (This IS required.)
- Download two GWFL files: xlive.ini and xlive.dll. You can download them from my Dropbox here.
- Place the two files into your MKAK install directory. The default should be C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection.
- The game should now work properly.
I really do wish WB Games/NRS would support MKAK again, as I can’t imagine there isn’t a market for the classic games. In the meantime, though, for those of us who bought the PC version and found it didn’t work on Windows 10, I’m hoping this will help. :-)