Questions about porting games in general

[digitallogic]

There are many games that were featured on all systems back in the '90s, most commonly sports games, but there were others, like Mortal Kombat, DOOM, etc. I know the Doom engine was portable, but I don't know what engine the original Mortal Kombat games used. When I tried to find it, all the results were about the newer versions. All I could find was that the new Mortal Kombat 1 used Unreal Engine. The closest I could find was this site. It just says gameplay engine.

I have always been curious about the relationship between game engines and console designs. My first question is, were game engines designed from the beginning to be able to be ported to all the other systems/consoles? Were consoles designed to be compatible with existing game engines? This goes hand in hand with the first question.

I've just always wondered how game devs were able to design a game so that it runs on so many hardware architectures. My second question is, how were they able to port a game that was already designed or in progress to a console that didn't exist before they started making the game?

My third question is what exactly determines the portability of games? Like, how would you make it so that it can be ported to say the Saturn, the PlayStation, and the N64? Does the game engine determine what it can be ported to?

I would be grateful for any expertise on this. 🙂

 

[digitallogic]

I started looking up different topics, and found some information about old graphics systems. I learned that they didn't use any portable graphics libraries back then, and they didn't port the games. They had multiple projects going on simultaneously for each platform. That's a major bummer. Well I guess I can forget about making a game that can run on multiple consoles 🙁