game a "good feel", with Boon simulating elements such as gravity into the video game design. The game's lead designer and artist John Tobias noted that the previous game's reliance on juggling the opponent in the air with successive hits was an accident, and had been tightened in Mortal Kombat II. Boon said that the reason to not completely remove it in favor of a different system of chaining attacks together was to set the game apart from the competing titles such as Street Fighter and allow for players to devise their own combinations of attacks. A double jump ability was implemented but later removed. At one point, a bonus stage was planned to feature "a bunch of ninjas jumping all over the place and you would swing at them, just like you're in the middle of a fight in a kung fu movie". All of the music was composed, performed, recorded and mixed by Dan Forden, the Mortal Kombat series' sound designer and composer, using the Williams DCS sound system. Like the first game, Acclaim handled the home conversions. San Francisco Chronicle claimed in 1994 that Acclaim had spent on developing, manufacturing and marketing the game. Characters To create the character animations for the game, actors were placed in front of a gray background and performed the motions, which were recorded on videotape (using a broadcast-quality, $20,000 Sony camera instead of the standard Hi8 camera used for the original Mortal Kombat). The video capture footage was then processed into a computer, and the background was removed from selected frames to create sprites. Towards the end of the game's development, they opted to instead use a blue screen technique and processed the footage directly into the computer for a similar, simpler process. The actors were lightly sprayed with water to give them a sweaty, glistening appearance, while post-editing was done on the sprites afterward to highlight flesh tones and improve the visibility of muscles, which Tobias felt set the series apart from similar games using digitized graphics. Animations of Shang Tsung morphing into other characters were created by Midway's John Vogel using a computer, while hand-drawn animations were used for other parts of the game, such as the Fatalities. For animating Goro and Kintaro, clay sculptures were created by Tobias' friend Curt Chiarelli and then turned into 12-inch latex miniatures that were used for stop motion filming. Because of technical