Vic Kombat

Vic Kombat is a 1995 Mortal Kombat parody for the Macintosh, built around digitized photographs of the developers themselves. Macintosh Garden credits James Hejl of Infinity Software, with gameplay reduced to pointing the mouse in different directions to throw kicks and punches at a single photo-fighter opponent.

Origin and homebrew style

Per the Macintosh Garden entry, the game's character art was shot in a single afternoon using early black-and-white QuickCams; Hejl himself served as the model for the main fighter while a friend named Jim handled most of the design and coding. Photoshop effects were layered onto the QuickCam stills before the team wired everything together in custom C code.

How it plays

Macintosh Garden sums it up as a "fighting game using photo images. Point the mouse in different directions to throw your kicks and punches." The Info-Mac upload, posted by author Vincent Paquin, frames the release simply as "a little piece of shareware [...] based on the highly popular arcade game Mortal Kombat," originally pulled from a Montreal BBS before being shared more widely.

Distribution path

Paquin's Info-Mac post (June 1995) shows the typical lifecycle of a mid-90s Mac shareware oddity: a BBS-sourced curiosity rebroadcast on Usenet, then mirrored to Info-Mac for international reach. The version on the Garden is logged at v4.1, packaged as Vic_Kombat.sit (about 820 KB).

Compatibility

Macintosh Garden lists Vic Kombat as 68k/PPC, running on System 7.0 through Mac OS 9, with a 4.6/5 user rating from 5 votes - small numbers, but a respectable cult standing for a parody fighter built in an afternoon.