It still is in my head… Didn’t they use real photos/video for the animation?

They did have people dress as the fighters and do poses and then took photos of them and turned these photos into sprites.

So the game was photorealistic (that is within the technological boundaries of the platforms the game ran on).

I’d love to see a 2D Mortal Kombat with the original photos taken from what we may consider the OG Mortal Kombat cosplayers.

I remember Altered Beast having amazing graphics, but it was just memory goggles. I was very disappointed when I got around to firing it up in an emulator.