Trivia / Mortal Kombat (1992)

• Acting for Two:
  • Daniel Pesina as Johnny Cage and the ninjas.
  • Ho-Sung Pak as Liu Kang and the elderly Shang Tsung.
• The Cast Showoff: Ho-Sung Pak could actually perform the cartwheel kick that Liu Kang used as his Fatality. This is presumably why Midway stopped using it when Ho-Sung Pak was replaced by Eddie Wong in Mortal Kombat 3.
• Descended Creator: The low budget also meant the voice acting was done by the developers, with Ed Boon doing Liu Kang, Kano and Scorpion (the last one's famous "GET OVER HERE!" is still voiced by Boon in all games).
• Dummied Out: Kano isn't playable in the Game Gear and Master System ports, though leftover text in the files suggested he was planned to be included at one point.
  • Same with Johnny Cage in the Game Boy port. He can even be "unlocked" through Game Shark, but he's a broken character with Sonya Blade sprites and Shang Tsung's fireball.
• Fake Nationality: Chinese-born Liu Kang was portrayed by Korean-born Ho-Sung Pak.
• Fan Nickname: With the release of Mortal Kombat 1, this game is referred to as MK '92 for the sake of distinction.
• Follow the Leader: Any fighting game with either a focus on gore or digitized graphics that came out in the wake of Mortal Kombat was generally considered a knockoff. Admittedly, many of them were, and sometimes it was hard to tell the good ones apart from the rest.
• No Budget: The game had a crew of only four, filmed the actors in a backroom with John Tobias' own camera (without even mats for them to properly do falls or rolls), and only got more attention from Midway once the demos became popular in the office.
• The Other Marty: Eric Kincaid was the first actor cast as Shang Tsung, but after the developers realized that Shang Tsung had too few moves as a boss and Kincaid was unavailable for re-shoots, the decision was made to have Ho-Sung Pak portray the sorcerer in addition to Liu Kang.
• Port Overdosed: Ported to every contemporary platform, including handhelds, and re-released many times since then in compilations and as a downloadable.
• Refitted for Sequel: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Sleeper Hit: Mortal Kombat was not intended to be the biggest franchise for Midway, but only a game to fill a gap in their arcade schedule. The game was developed as an inspiration of Karate Champ and a rival to Capcom's Street Fighter II by a team of only four members (programmer Ed Boon, artists John Tobias and John Vogel, and sound guy Dan "Toasty" Forden) in a ten month development cycle. Due to not being an overly important project, the team had a lot of freedom to make the game stand out via Rule of Cool. The rest is history.
• Throw It In!:
  • While the developers and actors were well-prepared for the video shoots to create their digitized sprites and knew what they'd be shooting, they developed ideas for some of the special moves right on the spot. Scorpion's iconic "Get over here!" spear toss was suggested in the middle of filming for the ninja characters by Ed Boon, which was simply started by him suggesting "You know what would be a cool-ass move?"
  • Reptile's entire existence is owed to some spur-of-the-moment mischief from Ed Boon. When the game was released to surprise success, Boon made note of the success of the Palette Swap method for Scorpion and Sub-Zero, he decided one day to sneak in a third ninja as a Secret Character (more specifically "a cooler version of Scorpion"), finishing the code and visuals that same night and shipping him out for the third arcade revision of the game. Reptile's inclusion was so surreptitious that no one else knew about his existence until he was already out in arcades, something that peeved co-designer John Tobias, leading the development of Mortal Kombat II to be more stringent on everyone in the development team being aware of any hidden characters (though Boon managed to pull the same stunt off anyway with Noob Saibot).
• Urban Legend of Zelda: Too many to count, many of which would became Ascended Memes:
  • Nudalities. The rumor involved Sonya since Most Gamers Are Male.
  • "Additional" Fatalities. This may have played a part in future games giving characters multiple Fatalities.
  • There were rumors you could play as Goro.^note You can play as him in a couple of the console ports, but not in the arcade. He is legitimately playable in the Game Boy port if you enter a secret code after beating the game. The SNES version has a very glitchy mode unlockable with a Game Genie that gives you extremely limited control of him, but it's easy to crash the game when you use it. It's a remnant bit of code for a planned feature similar to the Game Boy version (as a sort of make-up for the Nintendo-mandated censorship in the version that Acclaim knew was inevitable) that was omitted from the final game because of schedule constraints. It wasn't until Mortal Kombat Trilogy that he was Promoted to Unlockable, and the Nintendo Gamecube version of Mortal Kombat: Deception that you could finally play as him.
  • A standout example is Ermac. An early version of this game had a statistic in its DIP menu reading "Ermacs" (short for Error Macros) and sometimes it was said a glitch could turn Scorpion or Sub-Zero into a red-clad ninja fans named "Ermac."^note The color red may have had to do with a belief that the sprites were costumed red until the game needed them for one character or another, since Pesina was supposedly filmed in a red suit performing the moves; as seen here, however, Pesina wore Scorpion's yellow, and the developers likely pre-colored the sprites used by Scorpion, Sub-Zero, and Reptile. There never was a red ninja anywhere in the game's code, or even during production. The closest you could get would be Scorpion's P2 outfit being a slight orange, and that's only if both players were using him. Ermac was finally made playable in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.
  • Another, more minor rumor started after the home ports due to a glitch: if you fulfilled the conditions to fight Reptile during an Endurance Match, then you would fight both Reptile and a second, green tinted version of one of the regular fighters. There was speculation these were secret characters, but it was later proven just to be a bug.
  • The dev team initially tried to invoke this with Fatalities. The intention was that by keeping them secret, anyone who performed one would be confused and continue playing the game to see if they could figure out how to do it again. Leading to rumors that would increase interest in the game. While people would quickly discover that this wasn't a myth, it did succeed in garnering attention to the game.
• What Could Have Been:
  • As John Tobias revealed on his Twitter account, the game was almost called Dragon Attack before Mortal Kombat was approved by the legal team.
  • Liu Kang was originally going to be called Minamoto Yo Shin Soo. He was a Japanese mythological character, but John Tobias stated that they could not deal with the name. The fact that it's a misspelling ("Yoshitsune" - and also not Chinese) also likely helped prompt the change.
  • There's an unused character design based on Cynthia Rothrock but that was never used, although Sonya's original design is said to owe a lot to Rothrock.
  • Network play was in test before DSL and cable internet were in wide availability. The test games used T1 Lines.
  • Shang Tsung was originally supposed to be named Shang Lao, and sported robes that made him look more like a Chinese/Taoist emperor/sorcerer and more like Lo Pan's actual body rather than as a decrepit man; this included a hat and staff.
  • Player-input Fatalities were initially not part of the game design; the only Fatality originally planned would've gone to Shang Tsung, who would behead your character with a sword upon losing; traces of this still remain as there're unused sprites◊ of Shang Tsung's cut Fatality still in the game. The development team eventually came around to giving every character their own finisher and it became the game's key selling point.
  • An official port of the game to the NES was planned alongside the other ports, but they had to scrap it as Acclaim's NES programming resources were being used on Alien 3.
  • After the lukewarm response to the SNES version of the game, developer Sculptured Software, who handled the port, proposed releasing an updated version for the system titled Mortal Kombat Nitro, which would feature additional content such as new costumes, an expanded story mode with multiple endings, and Goro, Shang Tsung and Reptile made playable, as well as the restoration of the original Fatalities and blood. Although a prototype was made, development was halted in order to fully focus on the SNES port of Mortal Kombat II.
  • This game was going to be included in Midway Arcade Treasures 2 alongside it's first two follow ups, but at the last minute Midway decided to instead remove it from the collection to have it included as a preorder bonus for Mortal Kombat: Deception. This decision was made so late that prerelease articles and screenshots for Treasures 2 still prominently mentioned and showed the game as part of the collection.

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