Mortal Kombat 1 Gets Bigger Every Time It Crashes

I hope you have storage space to spare on your PC, because apparently MK1's crash reports need all of it.

Mortal Kombat 1 Nitara
Mortal Kombat 1 is horrifying in ways none of us expected! | © Warner Bros.

Mortal Kombat 1 (no, not the first Mortal Kombat game, that one's called Mortal Kombat) just can't stop generating headlines with its technical troubles. First the PC port was reported to have severe performance issues at launch, then the Switch version was revealed to look and run comically worse than any other version of the game. But this newest bit of technical tomfoolery is just plain odd: Players have discovered that every time the game crashes it generates an error report file, and that file tends to be around 1GB in size.

Automatic crash reports are a common practice in software development. These files are meant to be generated automatically when the program crashes and include relevant information such as what the user was doing, what the program was doing and what the user's system specs were.

When this report is sent to a developer they'll ideally be able to use that information to figure out what went wrong. These files are also meant to not be noticeably big and should be deleted off the user's system after they've been sent, but clearly MK1 didn't get the memo.

Mortal Kombat 1: Why Your Game Is Getting Bigger, And How You Can Fix It

Mortal Kombat 1 Scorpion Sub Zero Relationship
AAA game file sizes have been ballooning recently, but not quile like this. | © Warner Bros.

Some Mortal Kombat 1 PC players noticed a while after the game's launch that it seemed to be taking up a lot more space on their PCs than it did when they first installed it. So they did some digging, opened the folder reserved for crash reports and discovered that each of those reports was around 1GB in size. And with a game as unstable as MK1 is on PC, those crash reports can stack up fast. Some users reported that emptying that folder freed up as much as 70GB of space on their drives.

So, if you play Mortal Kombat 1 on your PC, consider checking if your game folder is also housing some of these data gluttons. Their file path should be something like "C:\Users\[UserName]\AppData\Local\MK12\Saved\Steam\Crashes". Mortal Kombat 1 developers NetherRealm have stated that they're looking into the issue, but in the meantime you'll have to do a bit of housekeeping on your PC every now and then.

Leonhard Kuehnel

When Leo isn’t busy playing the best videogame you’ve never heard of, he uses his knowledge to report on the latest news in the gaming industry. Never ask him how long his backlog is, though, you won’t like the answer....