The true story behind the Midway Logo in the Trash

The following, as with all posts here, represent the barely legible ramblings of a single person, and in no way reflect any sort of official position by or for any larger organization.

I was reading through the Kotaku comments (http://kotaku.com/5612465/so-long-midway-and-thanks-for-smash-tv) surrounding the “Midway Logo in the trash” picture Hans took, and I was struck at how evocative that single image is in regards to the story of the new NetherRealm studios under WB. I was also surprised how much internal context exists around this image that we take for granted. As such, I thought I’d pull out a few of the comments from the article and give some background for the record. Someday, somehow, someone will write a tell-all book about Midway’s history that will make the more provocative scenes from “Zap! The Rise and Fall of Atari” seem like Saturday morning cartoons in comparison. At this point though, I, along with most of the staff at NetherRealm, have only heard these stories 2^nd and 3^rd hand. The comments here are simply some observations about the last days in the old Midway building before starting in our fancy new WB office building.

“i think after the pic it was taken back out of the trash and home somewhere.”

Just so the record is complete, and some poor sap doesn’t go trying to find out where it ended up in 20 years or so, this sign did not in fact find a good home. This poor-quality item was definitely taken out of the trash, but only to be torn and beaten into a pulp.

“Gasp”, you say, “but this is a collector’s item! You folks at NetherRealm have no sense of your own history.” Sadly, we do have a sense of our own history, which is the reason that this sign was one of the items that became the target of years of pent-up frustration. But more on that in a moment, as first I want to calm the fear of collectors and those with a sense of Midway nostalgia.

“ Seriously? You're going to throw away the logo? I've got a friend of mine that kept the sign to a place he used to work at when it closed down…”

“Aw, why trash it? It's a perfectly good memorabilia item!”

Trust me, anything of any real collector’s value from Midway’s history is either long-gone in the homes of the “old time” former employees, auctioned off in bulk as part of the bankruptcy proceedings, packed up and coming with us to our new building, or locked safely away in some Warner vault in Burbank.

While very few employees at NetherRealm were around for Midway’s “glory days” in the arcade, we all share the same sense of Nostalgia that most video game fans have for arcade gaming. On a daily basis over the past several weeks emails would go out about random posters, props, t-shirts, and other miscellaneous “collectors stuff” that people could take before it was thrown in the trash as part of the clean-up process. Frankly, if your office wasn’t in close proximity to the cafeteria where they laid this stuff out, there was virtually no chance of grabbing anything remotely “collectable” before someone snatched it for safe-keeping. Nothing, and I mean nothing, was more disheartening than watching one of your colleagues walk off with some awesome piece of arcade art as you arrive to pick through the tattered “Hour of Victory” posters that had been hanging on the walls throughout the building.

So, before we get back to that logo in the trash, I want to assure the video game community that all the cool Midway stuff that may have been left in the building, and there honestly was very little at this point, is safe.

Now back to the now-deceased logo.

“What a sad day for all of us. RIP Midway.”

There is one key point of context to keep in mind about Midway. The “Midway” name as you know it has been officially dead for over a year, and the Midway of the arcade era had been dead far longer than that.

The NetherRealm team working on the new Mortal Kombat game, while largely consisting of former Midway employees, has been very happily part of WB Games for most of our current project, and we haven’t looked back for a second since the buyout.

The sign in the trash is just us shedding our last tie to Midway…the horrific building we’ve been stuck in for decades. From the annual “sewage flood” that required evacuation of the sports building, to the buckets permanently affixed to the ceiling to catch the leaks, to the non-functioning heating and air conditioning that would leave us sweltering in the summer and freezing in the winter, to the ad-hoc nature of building construction that led to a maze that made it literally impossible to find someone if they weren’t in their office, there is no love for the environment the team has somehow managed to overcome to create games.

There had been meetings and talks of getting a new building for years under Midway. It was a topic of conversation at nearly every “all hands” conference call. It had been promised and taken away so many times that it became a popular running joke. Within a year of our purchase by Warner Brothers, we are finally moving into a brand new, cutting-edge facility custom created based upon our present and future needs.

That sign that had been hanging on some interior wall represented a building that had nearly killed one of our engineers when a 10 gallon bucket filled with water came crashing through the ceiling right behind his desk.

That sign represented a building where every morning we had to walk by walls that had strange brown stains on them that were so deeply baked-in that they couldn’t be cleaned.

That sign was hung in a building where people literally had to evacuate their work areas because sewage water was shooting out of toilets and drinking fountains.

For this, and so many more reasons, that sign had to die so that we could start anew.

“They really shouldn't have gotten rid of the Midway name. Just because Warner Bros. owns them now, they could still exist as Midway.”

A lot of us at NetherRealm debated this point even before Midway went bankrupt, but frankly, outside of Mortal Kombat and a few other titles, Midway had really never managed to successfully transition to home consoles. The company did go bankrupt, after all, and luckily Warner Brothers identified a very talented group of people who somehow managed to create quality products under less-than ideal conditions. Like I mentioned earlier, I can’t think of a single person in the building who wanted to still exist as Midway, even if it was an option. Most of us desperately wanted a fresh start. But even more pragmatic than that, the Midway name had been driven so far into the ground in the past decade or so that we’d be insane to want to keep it. There were a lot of horrible console titles released by Midway, and the NetherRealm staff that was picked-up by Warner Brothers has very little connection to those projects or Midway corporate policy as a whole. Why start out on our new life with all the baggage of other projects we didn’t really work on created in a company that made poor decisions we weren’t part of?

I don’t want to beleaguer the point here, but let’s just say that much of working at Midway during the modern era would hardly be considered pleasant. Before the ink was dry on the acquisition by Warner Brothers, we all started referring to ourselves as “WB Chicago” until we picked the NetherRealm name. Despite some distinctly great memories, a lot of people “suffered” greatly under Midway, from horrific hours to underfunded games to questionable mandates we were powerless to stop. We were excited to get the opportunity to make the great games we had been trying to make with a publisher who would empower us to do so. I’m confident you’ll see the passion of the team finally freed from the shackles of the “Modern-era Midway” translated to the games the new NetherRealm studio will release. Unfortunately for the Midway sign, there had to be some casualties to get us there.