"The Mortal Kombat franchise, as it stands today, is far more a creation of Threshold and Kasanoff than of Midway," the suit states. "Midway's creative input was almost entirely limited to the videogames. On their own, the videogames provided only minimal back-story and mythology, and only flat, 'stock' characters with virtually no character development. ... Threshold was responsible for transforming each of the pattern or 'stock' characters present in the underlying Mortal Kombat video game from an unprotectable idea into a fully-realized, completely-delineated and independently copyrightable expression.