The Insane Lore of Mortal Kombat
A three-hour rundown of the game’s mythology from the 1992 Mortal Kombat to 2023’s Mortal Kombat 1 by ClementJ64. For a more extensive historical overview that doesn’t get into the mythology, there’s Ian Scherer’s excellent “The History of Mortal Kombat”1. Lots of dedicated research in both videos for a beloved thirty year-old franchise.
And there’s no “Game of Thrones”-level storytelling or world-building here. It’s a fighting video game where the characters’ abilities matter more than their stories or relationships. It’s fairly cogent but they do make things up as needed from one title to the next and every fan adjusts accordingly and is A-OK with the good fun of it all2. The only thing of importance to me is whether Sub-Zero and Scorpion are bros or sworn enemies across successive titles.
I didn’t think of the resources the game devs saved by giving us a nice rainbow palette of ninja-clones3 and this makes total sense. At least in the Good Old Days, color replacements and eleventh-hour backstories were cheaper than the space and memory required for brand new characters.
L-R: Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Noob Saibot, Smoke, Reptile, Ermac, Rain (Source)
It’s an old and ingenious trick and I love it.
Sprite reuse in Super Mario Bros (Source)
Plus
My cousin introduced me to the very first title and I was hooked. My dad bought us Mortal Kombat 3 for the PC at GITEX and I still remember my amazement and excitement. My sister and I spent a lot of time playing it (my favorites were Sub-Zero and Sektor and hers Sonya Blade, Sheeva, and Scorpion). Good times 🥋 And there was, of course, the absolutely legendary soundtrack.
My favorite memory is when we learned that there was a secret character (Smoke the Ninja) that we couldn’t unlock. My sister and I wrote a letter to Midway, to their address on the box (it was in the UK iirc), asking for help. A month later, a full guide showed up with happy notes from a few people. What a gesture; I wish I still had this most lovely document. We were beside ourselves with excitement but I wish we wrote a thank you letter.
Should I need to duel my sister after twenty-four years, there’s Mortal Kombat+, which is a set of enhancements and bugfixes to the original trio of games. Fight!
Which ends with a very touching reminiscence and dedication 🙏↩︎
Here’s a great example. “A counter for ERMACS (short for error macros) on the game’s audits screen was additionally interpreted by players as referring to a second hidden character named Ermac. Midway denied the character’s existence in the series before adding him to Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 in response to the player rumors and feedback.” (Wikipedia).
So they add him to the game and make him “a fusion of the many souls destroyed in Outworld’s wars, only to be controlled by Emperor Shao Kahn and his Shadow Priests. Because of this, he refers to himself as ‘we’, ‘our’, ‘us’, and ‘ours’, instead of ‘I’, ‘my’ ‘me’, and ‘mine’. Because of the sheer concentration of souls within Ermac, he possesses the gifts of telekinesis, teleportation, and the ability to travel between realms.” (MK Wiki)↩︎Same deal with ninjesses Kitana, Mileena, and Jade.↩︎