Midway is a recognizable name outside of hardcore gaming circles, known as the U.S. distributors as Space Invaders and Pac-Man back in the day.

What those outside the gaming community might not know is that Midway recently filed for bankruptcy. Even one of their crown jewels, the Mortal Kombat franchise, is potentially up for sale.

If it were any other company, I wouldn’t think that was such a big deal. Mortal Kombat ruled the arcades during its heyday, despite not being particularly deep for a fighting game, but fans of the genre have largely eschewed more recent iterations of the series. (Mortal Kombat vs. DC sold pretty well but apparently not well enough to save the company.)

But this is Midway. They’ve barely got any other intellectual property left. They’re already all but sold off Wheelman, which Ubisoft picked up. Selling MK would be the very definition of eating their seed corn, assuming they think they can survive at all.

The real jerk move on Midway’s part, as reported by Kotaku in the same article about the bankruptcy, is that Midway is reneging on a promise to pay unused vacation time to laid-off employees while setting aside millions of dollars for executive bonuses.

As Gamasutra notes, a good chunk of those millions is set aside for executives if they don’t sell Mortal Kombat.

I guess this is why I don’t make the big bucks. Whenever I don’t do things, I usually don’t do them for free. I can think of a dozen things I didn’t do today that nobody paid me not to do. I’ve been ignoring a huge potential revenue stream.

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