True story: When MK4 "shipped" they sent out empty cabinets sans-boards as the game wasn't finished and the CEO wanted to get the game out and start making some much-needed sales. The boards were shipped out to the people who bought those empty cabinets a week or two later. The first rev of the software that went out was far from complete.
I don't recall what was in the version that was shown during the "truck tour" as my memory isn't that good from something so long ago but suffice it to say it was pretty bare bones and only had a few characters playable and none of them were complete.
In what will go down as an act of cruelty to a ton of die-hard MK fans, long before the truck tour, we needed to film a promo video for the game. Someone in marketing had the idea to film the game on location being played in front of a ton of people. They picked Enchanted Castle as the location and the location advertised that MK4 would be there that night for a special sneak preview. A huge crowd of kids showed up thinking they were going to get to play the game. The empty cabinet sat at the arcade roped off all day. At night time we showed up, plugged in a dev board that had only raiden and liu kang playable (and barely playable at that) and Eddie Ferrier and myself proceeded to play the game in front of this huge crowd for about a half an hour. When the guys had enough footage between us playing and the people in the crowd we turned the machine off, packed it up and had it driven back to the office. I remember them interviewing me on camera as "a fan" of the game about how much I liked it which was perhaps one of my finest acting gigs in my career.
Ah the good old days... Working on that project wasn't a whole lot of fun most of the time which was in stark contrast to working on MK3/Ultimate which was probably the most fun project I worked on in my time at that company.