Retronauts - 548: Mortal Kombat II & 3

Episode Date: July 25, 2023

DUN DUN DUN…Podcast? Again? Diamond Feit, Stuart Gipp, and author David L. Craddock return to Outworld—and the ’90s—for a bone-crunching conversation about Mortal Kombat II and Mortal Kombat 3.

This episode of Retronauts is brought to you by a notion. This week in Retronauts, what are you doing next? I'm going to go to Outworld! Good evening, everybody. Welcome back to Retronauts and welcome to this very exciting, very dangerous episode about Mortal Kombat. But not the first Mortal Kombat, because we did that. That was back in episode 447. That was an eternity ago.

An attorney ago? Hey, there's a reference for those combat fans out there. I absolutely don't get it at all. You're referring to Edenia. Eternia. Is that Masters of the Universe? Oh, my God. There it is. What a way to make a joke that immediately be corrected. That's perfect.

Anyway, my name is Diamond Fight. I know nothing about Mortal Kombat. Clearly, I'm just here for the clicks, but I've got two guests here. Two expert guests. We're going to figure this out. Let's go first to the UK and our recurring correspondent. Hello, I'm the beloved Stuart Chip,

and my favorite Mortal Kombat character is Man-EFaces. Thank you, Stuart. And our other guest, I think, is in the United States. Yes, that's correct. Northeast Ohio, the mecca of Mortal Kombat, but not really. I am David O. Craddock. I am the author of the Long Live Mortal Kombat series, and it has lived long.

It's a little over 30 years as of October 2022, and I'm writing about the history of all the games. That is great. I just want to pitch in with that. It's really, really good. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah.

I think I was on the Kickstarter. I was loving it. It's great. We talked about it in the first episode as well, the Mortal Kombat one episode. Sorry, I'm not taking this over. You get over to you, Diamond. That's all right. What you said wasn't completely true.

There was a Kickstarter for his book. I assume Kickstarter has ended because that was well over a year ago. And I don't think Kickstarter go more than like two months. But that's cool, because what's happening today is we're talking about the sequels, the immediate sequels to Mortal Kombat, because when Mortal Kombat about hit in 1982, it was, it was big. It became really big. Even though there were only seven characters, it became a phenomenon. All those seven characters became pretty famous. And there was even a date, September 13th, 1983, aka Mortal Monday, which was a rare, early occasion where

they were actually hyping a launch date for a video game, which didn't happen that often. Today, it's pretty normal. I mean, as we're recording this, you know, there's a video game upcoming later this week that everyone's very excited about. It's been years in the making. But back in the 90s, they didn't do that very often. So it was a big deal when Mortal Monday came around. The only other one I can think of was

November 24th, 1992, which was Sonic Tuesday. Yes. Another good example. Yeah, those are the two biggies, I would say. It was still a rare occasion, right? And then I feel like Mortal Monday was the one that really put it on the map. A lot of other publishers were like, oh, this is a

thing. We can do this. We can build hype around a date. I would say so, because the Mortal Monday, like, the commercials were specifically about that day, and they filmed, they filmed, the ads were very famous because they were running around Lower Manhattan, and, uh, I don't think I mentioned this last time, but I actually went to high school with, with one of the kids in that ad, and so after it came out, which was during our senior year, like, everyone would just shout Mortal Kombat at him, like, whenever possible in the halls, which is like, right, you said. I mean, I don't know what he expected, but that's, like, that's absolutely what he got.

Anyway, but a funny thing happened, just a few months after Mortal Monday, they made another Mortal Kombat, and they called it Mortal Kombat 2. So today we're going to pick up the conversation with Mortal Kombat 2, which arrived in late 1993, November, maybe December, depending where you live. Again, arcade games really didn't have, like, dates, so we're just, you know, we're working with, you know, spotty histories there. But we know it came out after the games were already out at home. and Mortal Kombat 2 in my opinion really felt like a dramatic upgrade to the first game even though it only came out about a year later

I feel like a lot changed in that year would you concur a lot changed yeah absolutely and in some ways great and small like the the tech was a little better so characters were they moved much smoother and one of the the big changes that might not seem big right away but that really

opened the competitive community's eyes to Mortal Kombat 2, kind of taking more seriously was when you jumped over opponents, your character would twist to stay focused on them. So in the first game, if you did a flying kick over their head, you wouldn't turn around, which made you look like a sucker as soon as you hit the ground. But in

this case, you actually could. So you could do things as you could in Street Fighter 2, kind of like floatovers to kind of confuse them as to win and where to block and, you know, go for a really deep juggle combo, which is when you kind of wait until the last second to to pull off your flying kick, and that way that pops them into the air right as you hit the ground

and you can just, you know, flow into some more moves from there to juggle them around. Yes, I think even some characters, if you do a deep enough jump kick, you can just do another jump kick, right? You can, like, land and then do a quick one, I believe. Yeah, there are, I mean, this brought into the four, you know, a lot of corner strategies, which brought it closer to Street Fighter 2, you know, by this time that had become kind of the standard bear for the competitive community, like, you know, different strategies depending on where you stood and where your opponent stood relative to, you know, your positions on the screen. But also, I think that Mortal Kombat, too, it was still a, still had a somewhat photorealistic

look, still used digitized actors, but it had more of a comic book veneer. It was just so much more, so much more vibrant. So between the, you know, the changes to the mechanics of the game, the more vibrant veneer aesthetic and then the smoother movement, this was really, really kind of where Mortal Kombat began for a lot of people. I've got to say as well that with One or Combat 2, even before you put your money in the machine, you've got this really exciting a track mode going running around

with the sort of really well-composed story scenes and Shao Khan looking like an absolute, you know, beast that he is. And then there's quick cuts of just violence, fast-paced violence, I think. They really set it apart. And then, of course, you know, the lightning forming the big two and then the huge model combat crashing in from the sides. I remember as a kid seeing that a track mode on a loop

because I didn't have any money. So I would just watch that and just get increasingly hyped for it. Of course, when I did get to play, it delivered, as we said, I think this is the, I don't know, it's kind of the model combat game. Does that make sense? Like, it's the one. Like, it's the one that you can wholeheartedly recommend, I think. Not that there's anything wrong with necessarily the other ones.

It's just that this, to me, is the most focused one. It's the least bloated, you know, everything seems to be there for a purpose, but it still has a lot of fun additional things, gimmicks and gags and secrets to enjoy without being completely over the top like Mortal Kombat 3 was. But we'll get to that, obviously. Yeah, agreed. I mean, this is the one where I think it has a lot of people's favorite roster introducing so many fan favorites that are still fan favorites today.

And it's really kind of the rare instance, except for the upgrades of the MK3 series, which we'll talk about later, where the whole cast did carry over in a way. You know, Sonia and Kano weren't selectable, but they were visible on one of the backgrounds, which to Stewart's point, really kind of drew fans into the lore. You wondered how they got captured. Could we free them? You know, the secrets around Mortal Kombat were really swirling around this time because of the fatalities, which were really considered. a secret in the first game, you know, if you heard about someone doing a fatality, that was something you had to see to believe. Like, you don't do that in video games. Video games are like Mario. But in Mortal Kombat 2, they really leaned into that. Even on the battle plan, you saw

a question mark. So you knew there's at least one hidden fight there, at least one, but there were several more. Yeah. That's right. And in fact, if you don't do something special, your character just bypasses the question mark. So like, if you, if you, probably the first time you play Mortal Combat 2, you're like, what is this? And then you go past, you're like, wait, wait, what was that? And then, you know, unless you know what to do, you don't get it. I've got to interject, the first time you play Mortal Kombat 2, you do not get to the question mark, I'm sorry.

No, no, definitely. You get your ass speed. A lot of quarters to get even half that far. But it was, I mean, some of the secret characters, which we can discuss is, you know, they were so secret that even co-creator John Tobias did not know about them. This really kind of established Ed Boone's penchant for burying secrets so deeply that only he could find them without a treasure map. Well, let's talk a little bit about what Stu mentioned with us, the attract mode and what things have changed, because they really, they absolutely lean harder into

their original story telling their original concept, and it takes, you know, bold steps away from the sort of, you know, bog standard End of the Dragon that was the first game. Because, yeah, even if you don't put your money in this machine, it tells you that, guess what, Lou Kang, he won that Moral Combat Tournament, he beat Goro, he beat Shang-sung, and Shang-sung went back to his master. There was a master, there was a master of this guy named Shaqan. He looks very large, and he He's the emperor of some place called Outworld, and he doesn't like this. He doesn't like losing. So when he decides, yes.

Sorry, I don't mean to interject. I wanted to just say, this story stuff, for one thing, seems for an arcade game, for a coin-op, seems deeply unusual to even bother including it. And secondarily, this may be post-Mortal combat two, so while the means correct me, but the comics that they were putting out, like, about the Dowell's, de Zan and stuff, and Gauri Prince of Pain, I think they were the place to kind of get this stuff before MK2. Am I wrong about that? The Malibu comics, I think, put them out,

maybe? Yeah, I think that was around the time of Mortal Kombat 2, but it does sort of predate that because both Mortal Kombat 1 and 2, part of the attract mode was advertising a collector's edition comic that was... Oh, yeah.

They were advertised in later updates to both games. It wasn't there, like, from day one, But the funny thing is when I talked to John Tobias about this, I said, you know, like, it was very rare to put in a track modes that were more than just, you know, brief flashes of gameplay to kind of get you hyped. And, you know, I said, you know, some people would stand there just waiting to read character bios, waiting to see these just beautifully drawn story scenes. Did you, you know, I asked me, did you and Ed want that? And he's like, well, it was always kind of a push and pool because even I, you know, John Tobias is kind of the, you know, he often receives credit as the brain behind Mortal Kombat's lore, but he and Ed were constantly passing ideas back and forth, just kicking things around. So he would say, you know, we both wanted people to put in their quarters, but I also kind of knew that, yeah, people might stand there and kind of maybe hope for no one else to be playing so they could just read as many character bios as possible. I think that's really cool on forward thinking, honestly,

because the fact that the story from these games has more or less carried through all the way to the modern day, even with an in-universe kind of reboot. I think that's real interesting and forward thinking that they did that basically, and the fact that they had these tie-in comics at all. I know Straight Fighter had story as well, but God knows what it was.

I have no idea. Mortal Kombat can tell you a lot, but not Street Fighter. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. thing. Around this time, from about 1991 through 1994, Capcom was just iterating on the same game. And Street Fighter 2, no question

that it was revolutionary, but... Oh, yeah. I think I made this joke, I made this joke maybe here, but I did on a lot of podcasts. Like, the most lore you were going to get out of a Street Fighter 2, a track screen was like learning reuse blood type or something. It wasn't really captivating, right? But, like, the interesting thing, when you beat Mortal

Combat 1, you saw these different endings, and you're like, oh, so which of these endings is true? Because they can't all be the champions of Mortal Kombat. But then you go into Mortal Kombat, too, and right away from the attract mode, you realize Luke Hang's the champion, but what else could have happened?

And it's established the endings as, these are not what happened. These are what if scenarios, what if this character won. And there were certain things like, when you beat the game as Sub-Zero, you realized, oh, this isn't even the same Sub-Zero

for Mortal Kombat. Scorpion killed him. And this is Sub-Zero's younger brother. So you were establishing these familial relationships. There were new rivalries. You know, Sonia and Cano were both abducted. So, probably just like spitting at each other from across Shao Kahn's arena. But you had Lou Kang really after the Tarkatan, Baraka's race, which, it's hard to remember this, but the Tarkaten weren't even named Immortal Combat, too. It was just like, oh, a bunch of

Barakas sort of thing. But there are all these new little wrinkles in the lore, and it was just so, so fascinating. And in fact, there are a lot of people who, really miss the style of storytelling where you were kind of, it's almost like a Dark Souls game where you kind of, you know, it actually is. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. I have to, I have to make a Dark Souls, right? Everything is, everything is like Dark Souls these days. I'm just carrying it forward, right? But like, you know, how do these pieces of lore connect? Whereas today in the modern Mortal Combat games, the cinematic, really, they're playable movies. And they're very well done. They're very fun, but there's really no, there aren't as many questions to be asked because everything

is spelled out for you. And that's really not as interesting, even to me, um, as these arcade games because I, I mean, I was the guy downloading like 40 to 60 page MKFAQs and reading them behind my trapper keeper math class. Like, okay, what, what's, what's the lore? What's the speculation? What's the backstory? I wanted to connect all these pieces, much like one would do playing a Dark soul skin. I mean, I had a collection of those comics I mentioned. I don't know where I got it from, falling to pieces, because I read it so much. It wasn't even good, but I loved it. Just the sheer magnetism of the characters that they've designed, like, they really are appealing and interesting. And that's something for me personally, I can't say about almost any

other fighting game. Maybe some of the King of Fighters stuff, but I can't even begin to tell you what the story is in those games. No. And I feel like that's probably almost intentional because for a long time, a lot of fighting games were just street fighter clones. And they were clones in almost every way, like aesthetically, but also like story. Who cares? It's just a bunch of fighters in the tournament. It was John Tobias and Ed Boone going like, here's where Scorpion hangs his mask sort of things. Like really wanting to give you more insight into the characters. And they were, they weren't really thinking about this at the time because all arcade games. manufacturers were just heads down on one project and boom onto the next, but they were slowly building what would become during Mortal Kombat 2, a just consumer multimedia empire. Well, as I was saying, part of this new story initiative is the idea that you have this emperor and he's lived somewhere in the Outworld, and somehow he decides that, well, we're just going to host the next tournament. So we're going to, now the Mortal Kombat takes place

in Outworld. And what this does is, it gives the game an excuse to sort of, redesign the world, if you will, so because we're not in our world anymore, we're in this outworld, this other place. So all the levels look nothing like the last game. Everything looks weird. It's like there's monstrous stuff. There's weird stuff. There's also, I mean, Outworld as a place is, you know, they get to make it up. So I really enjoy the variety of stages you see, you know, even in something simple as like the pit too, which is again, it just, it is like it's a big pit, right? But they had the, this weird, like, uh, background where you see another bridge behind your bridge and there. And, like,

I know for us as children, we were always like, who's on that bridge? What are those, what are those figures back there? What does that mean? Just, you know, are those extra fighters? Can we go back there? You know, people told me stories you could go back there or people would come back to the front. Like, they're all fake. But little things like that really went, uh, went a long way to sort of building not just the lure they had in mind, but letting the players sort of make up their own lore and at that point it's all valid until you hear otherwise well they were fake at the time and then in later games some of that stuff became true almost as a kind of an easter egg for the fans i know the living forest trees eating uh players was a thing was like a rumor that

they eventually put into uh what's it called shalin monks on the PS2 uh they added that in and in the newest game in model combat 11 you can go to the second bridge in the back ground of the pit as a little and that's something that I think helps to create that connection between the community and the developers you know so you feel like it's for you even though it's this Warner brothers multi-million corporate thing you feel like it's for you and I think Mortal Kombat has always done a relatively good job of that even when it was in its kind of wilderness making stuff like special forces I think they still did a decent job it's what connects me to Mortal Kombat really

because I'm terrible at Mortal Kombat but I love the characters and I love the world and I love all the silly things about it but every time I play it I just get destroyed you know yeah I mean

just to your point it was it was really interesting to compare and contrast how Moral Combat and Street Fighter kind of positioned their stages like Street Fighter 2 stages were sort of representative

of the character to whom the background belong you know like you know you fought Chun Li a Chinese marketplace, you fought Ryu in a studio that was very Spartan and almost monastic because he was just so concentrated on improving and growing. Whereas Mortal Kombat stages, and Mortal Kombat 2s, they are, every stage is a piece of a world. And you're seeing how this all comes together. And the island was like that, but the island's environments were much

less interesting. It was like the courtyard and the courtyard with monks in it sort of thing. And now here, as you said, you have, you know, a living forest where characters are peeking out from behind trees. You have the pit, too, where, you know, there's this character fighting in the background. You have this portal with monks guarding it. And you're wondering, like, can I go through that portal? And it turns out you can in a way. Every stage offered something, whether it was a stage fatality or a little tease as to, you know, what it meant for the lore. It was world building is really the term we would use now.

it is it is something that's been to some extent lost with the advent of the internet or at least the popular internet because you can just look this stuff up back then of course this was all changing hands in the playground you know this was all like oh I heard you can be um reptile in this game or no sorry

he's not hidden in this but you know um you can be god who all the hidden characters into crap it's escaped completely so jade jade right jade and and noob cybot yeah it's like if you press this when the toasty guy is on the screen, you get to fight smoke. If you do this with through one round, you get to fight Jade. It's like, it's law, it's playground

law. That's just what it is. And I love the fact that they lead into that in this way, including red herrings, things that ultimately do mean nothing at the time. Yeah, like everything kind of means something. And it went even deeper than that. Like you not only, you had to fight smoke by, I think it was holding down and pressing your start button, but only in multiplayer and only on the portal stage. And so it was almost, it was kind of another layer of competition because the player, if you both knew that input, whoever inputted it at first was the one who got to face smoke and get ruthlessly murdered by a grossly unfair AI. You know, it was a privilege. I don't need to tell you this, folks, but life is already complicated enough.

And on top of that, you have to work for a living? What's up with that? And if your line of work involves being on the dang computer all day, you know how hard it can be to track tasks, set goals, all while trying to spend as little time as possible switching tabs and sorting docs. But never fear. That's where Notion comes in. I'm excited to share that they just launched Notion Projects, which includes new, powerful

ways to manage projects and leverage the power of built-in AI features too. Notion Projects combines project management with your docs, knowledge base, and AI, so you can stop jumping between tools and stop paying too much for them, too. In just one workspace, you can do everything

you need to get your projects over the finish line, from brainstorming to drafting launch plans to organizing sprints and keeping everyone on deadline. Notion is super customizable too. View projects any which way as a timeline, table, or con bond board. There's also powerful filtering and automation features so you can work exactly the way you want. And on top of that, Notion AI helps you automate all that tedious overhead like summarizing meeting notes or finding next steps, freeing you up to do the deep work. Do your most efficient work with Notion projects. You can try it for free today at Notion.com slash retro. That's all lowercase letters, notion.com. com slash retro when you use our link you're supporting our show go right now to notion dot com slash retro well let's dive into the roster because there there are quite a few changes here first of all they've expanded

significantly you know the first game has seven game for seven fighters this new game has 12 and most of the fighters in the first game carryover notably yes canon and sonya did not make it supposedly the story I've always heard is that those two were just the two least popular of the original seven says it okay well we won't use them anymore there's a little bit of clarification on that and I asked about that too like you know today games can you know send all sorts of statistics over servers you can you can find out anything you want about your game sonia and cano were the least popular in the arcades that ed and john pulled around chicago they could go into the debug mode and look at the least selected. But elsewhere, like the DOS manual for the PC port,

the DOS port of Mortal Kombat 1, listed Sonia as one of the most popular characters. And in terms of the tier list, she is by far and away the strongest character in the game to the point where she is broken in some version. So it just depended back then. Like, you know, things were so different. It just depended on this was the local data that they had and they just kind of had to apply it on a global scale for the roster. But certainly Lou Kang is there because he's the winner of the first tournament. So he comes back, and I do like the fact that they've changed, I mean, everyone's outfit has changed, you know, to some degree, but I like that they've, they've altered him so he doesn't just look like a regular Bruce Lee type. He's got some color to him, which

I also, I want to point out, in that first game, there was a lot of just plain, very simple color palette. Like, a lot of characters just wore black or gray. And, you know, as I said from, you know, Sub-Zero and Scorpion, there wasn't that much color there. And so when you had, like, mirror match of, you know, one character find the same character, you just had, you fought like a slightly darker version of the same character, and they looked almost identical. And I really feel like they must have learned that. They must have learned that was a mistake, because every character in this game and going forward, they've got some kind of bright color on their body that can be palette swapped and reversed for player two. Yeah, it's a much more vivid and much

more appealing to look at, I think. And as was mentioned, I forget who said it, so I apologize, but does have a much more comic book aesthetic as a result. It doesn't lose some realism, but it's just, it pops, you know, it looks great in the arcade. It stands out. So, Lou Kang, Lou Kang has like a headband and like a stripe on his pants that can be changed, you know, the colors can change. Johnny's got, I think, something on his boots or like, he's got like black pants, like some leggy, like some like knee pads or something. So everyone has something on their on their body that can be can be flopped or at least at least changed in tone like sub zero one scorpion are still going to be the blue guy and the yellow guy but because the colors

are so brighter and bolder you can see the difference this time around it's not it's not subtle as it was in mortal combat one it was almost too subtle yeah to the point where i don't remember if this was only in the super nintendo version because that's the version i played exponentially more than the in the arcade but katana who's my favorite character had a a silver outfit instead of blue. And just because of the rarity of the silver outfit, you know, it only came up in a mirror match and always for player two, I always preferred that outfit. Yes.

We'll get to Katana in a second. But yes, as part of this redesign, Lou Kang also, I have to point out, this is the first game that gives him his now infamous bicycle kick, where you have to hold on the button, and then he launches himself forward in an impossible manner, and he just kicks over and over and again. I thought I was in one. Am I completely mistaken? on that. I could have sworn that was in a postman.

That was two. Wow. Okay. That's really weird. I have a false memory, a Mandela effect of me playing the Snesport of the first game and doing that move, but obviously I didn't. It's, I mean, it's a very famous attack, but this is where it started. Also, very simply, is that

you know, he has, his fatality from the first one carries over, but he has a new one where he turns into a dragon, which I think raised a lot of questions at the time, like, wait, he can just turn to a dragon? You know, why don't you leave with that, brother? But Whatever. It just, it looks cool as hell. It's very much, you know, it's still, this is 1983. So morphing is still a big deal, you know, when you morph something. I think, oh, geez, Michael Jackson's Black of White, I think was, was that 92 or 93? It wasn't 91, was it? No. Oh, gosh. I think it was 93. I think you're right there. And the cool thing about the dragon was that it was more storytelling. New King was the only character in Mortal Kombat 1 who, when he performed a fatality, the screen.

green didn't darken. But in Mortal Kombat 2, he's more out for, he's almost on a quest for revenge because all of his fellow monks were slaughtered. So the screen darkens when he does his cartwheel kick. And he turns into the dragon, which is, of course, the symbol of the Mortal Kombat tournament. He is Mortal Kombat. It's kind of cool. It was 91, by the way. Oh, 91. Wow. Yeah, earlier than I thought as well. Well, anyway, I mean, the dragon, the dragon morph is the inspiration behind the, the animalities, right? I mean, it's got to be. I would say so I would say

impossible to do So Johnny Cage is back He's got a new outfit He's no longer Just Bloodsport Jean-Cla Van Dam They threw in a weird

Alternate version of his fatality Where you can just enter a different code And he punches your head off three times I guess because In the first game If you were fast enough You could punch off

Two heads, right? Yes I think that's the joke there Yep So it is a gag and not a glitch It was a glitch in one and a gag and two. Gotcha. Okay.

Yeah, it's like a special, it's a different command than the regular command. It's like, you know, you have to do it intentionally. Raiden has a makeover. Somehow he's a good guy now. The first game, he was very much a bad guy, but now he's a good guy. He's supposedly the protector of Earth realm. I also, I don't know what it's called, but to me, I always viewed his new outfit as he's just, he's wearing a new smock. He's just got this little blue, this little blue kindergarten thing on top of his regular outfit, which this looks kind of cute.

this was prior to the first movie, but it would have been in production, right? Am I wrong there? Ooh, ah, it's 93? I don't know if they're actually shooting at this point. Right, right. I just wondered, but if it was to do with the movie that he was now a good guy,

as, you know, has changed for the film. But it doesn't really, I'm probably wrong. It's just a coincidence, maybe. I think the movie takes elements from two and three because three was, you know, three actually comes out the same year as the movie. So I think when they're making the movie,

they have a lot more lore to work with, and they start pulling that stuff together. Yeah, that's correct. I mean, I think that, you know, this was just, you know, they did the first game, which was pretty much, you know, John and Ed's kind of enter the dragon, but a video game and with ninjas. And then, you know, with Mortal Kombat, too, they were like, let's rethink, let's kind of establish some of these characters.

And they kind of, you know, had Raiden pick aside, basically. Yeah. Good for him. I want to say he joined the winning team, but I guess, depending on the reality, he didn't win the team. I don't know. Rayden now is kind of the good guy who screws everything up all the time, and everyone wants him to just stop, you know.

Yeah, he's pretty temperamental for an elder god. It's a poor quality for when you're as powerful as he is, I think. Yeah, everyone's just like, thanks for the Armageddon, mate. Thanks for that. Cheers, Raiden. So, let's talk about Sub Zero, because Sub Zero is back. He was always one of the most popular characters, and they threw in a new move,

where you can throw ice in the ground, which I always like to use, even though I felt it was very rarely, like, useful. I just thought it was funny. And yes, as David alluded to earlier, when, if you beat the game with Sub Zero, the ending actually shows his face. Now, it's not the actor Daniel Pacino who played him in the first game and the second game again, but they actually went to a then recent midway hire, a young man named Joshua Tsui, and they said, look, we need, we want him to be Asian, you're Asian here. And literally, as we have a quote from him, which says, the joke back then was anytime they needed an Asian dude at Midway, it turned out to be me.

But Josh would run with that because he would eventually become the Lou Kang model in Mortal Combat 4. And just a few years ago, he directed an entire documentary about Midway called Insert coin. So Josh really, you know, went from, hey, we need you to take a picture to I'm deep involved in this project, and hopefully I'm loving it. Even then, it shows the fluidity of development. Like, for Mortal Kombat 3, you know, Sub Zero unmasked was played by a white guy named

John Turk. So, you know, I did ask John Tobias about this. He said, yeah, we were playing pretty fast and loose. You know, some parts of the lore stuck, others we were just kind of playing around changing here and there. Yes, honestly, we can go on a big tangent because, yeah, later games have established the actual names of the original Sub-Zero. the sub-zero younger and how the first sub-zero became another character. But I don't want

to get into all that. It is, it actually is legit fascinating to me, but I don't want to get into it right now because it's like, it's actually a gigantic discussion because these characters, you know, have deep and intertwined lives. Yeah. And there are some fans who just played for that reason, right? Like, they just wanted to really dig deep into that. Speaking of which Scorpion is back, Scorpion hasn't changed that much, although I do like as a little detail, they erase his pupil, so he looks more sort of like ghostly, which I think is a nice touch. And Reptile graduates from secret character to regular character, and he's just, you know, he's basically a green, a green sub-zero, but they give him a new thing where he can pull off his mask,

like his face, not his, like mask, but his entire head is actually a mask, and underneath he's got like a lizard head, and he can eat your head with his head. And he can also turn invisible. and there's a fatality where he turns invisible and he kills you. What does he do? I don't know. He's invisible. You can't see him. I love that.

I mean, Reptile has got to be the model combat character who's gone through the most drastic physical appearance changes throughout the series. Like, he's gone from a sort of human with a reptile head to just like a full-on feral, like reptile creature in later games. And then he's kind of gone back to being an injury again. It's kind of funny. Yeah, there's a lot of debate among fans about which. which version of reptile is, you know, the best, where, you know, you have a mass ninja one end of the spectrum and then total feral reptile with a really long tail at the other. I kind of fall somewhere in between, but I actually look forward to seeing not only if

reptile will be in every new game, but just what form he'll take, because I just, I love seeing it fluctuate over time. That's cool. So we mentioned that Cana was on the outs, but that didn't mean they didn't like Richard DeVizio. No, they brought him back and they said, okay, look, we want to give you this sort of Nosephratum mask, and you're going to be a weird guy from Outworld. We're going to put knives in your arms. You're going to stab people. It's going to be great. So he's playing

a new character called Baraka, and he's one of the Outworld, like, regulars. So he's like, appearance alone, you can tell this guy is, you know, kind of messed up. He's got these swords. I always felt that one of, you know, he has one of the more graphic fatalities, but it's also one of the more silly ones where he just stabs you and you just sort of bleed. But it looks, it's kind of horrifying, but it's also kind of funny because you slowly slide down his knives and like it just stops like you kind of wonder like what does he do next does he pull you off like does someone help him like because otherwise he just got a dead body on his arms like what does he do that's why the screen fades he's like look away this is gonna i got to actually like

yeah kiss this yeah kick this guy up and i think this was you bring up a great point which is um this is the last mortal combat where the fatalities could be somewhat grounded like you know baraka's two fatalities are one he just slices your head off into the other. He just kind of lets you bleed to death on these knives. There were some explosions and things of that nature, but it got really out of hand later on. Which we will talk about once we get to the next game. But for now, he's, I would say, most fatalities are cool in some way, and he's definitely got some of the more primal ones, because he just has knives in his arms. What are you going to do? Indeed, he has a move that's

not even a fatality that just looks really painful, which is that sort of anti-air slashing move, If he does that, you can't jump into him. You can't really touch him. And, you know, he swings his arm around for a few seconds. And it's like, if you get too close to him, you just get slashed up and blood flies everywhere. It's like, okay, okay, Melina, I'm going to stand here and I'm going to be doing this. And if you get, if you get stabbed your own fault, it's just that Simpson's bit. Sorry, sorry, I had to.

And indeed, if you're playing the AI, it can do that, you know, in an instant. If you jump at the computer and it's Baraka, he just does that move. Okay, well, you were, you made a mistake. Zamiar. She is the new actor. She's playing Kitana and Molina, Katana's twin sister. They are, of course, pallet-swapped ladies. And Catalan, Catalan, I'm sorry, I didn't look this up, but I think it's Catalan or Caitlin. Anyway, it is Catalan, yeah. She was a graduate student. She was a forensic science instructor. She had an anthropology degree, but of course she also practiced karate and Okinawa and martial arts. She was recruited by Daniel Pesnia to be in the game. Katana is a really deep lore. character. She's invested in a lot of stuff. I think it's no surprise that she shows up in the first movie that comes out a couple years later because they really, she's connected to a lot of characters and has a very important role. In this game, you don't really get a sense of how important she is. She just seems like a cool person because she has big fans. She throws the fans.

She swings the fans. She has one move where she spins her fans around and she lift you off the ground. And if you do that move at the wrong time or to the wrong character, you can outright freeze the game. Is that something that got patched out? I believe it did get patched out eventually. But, yeah, Katana, I mean, between her fan lift and her fan throw, which I think is the goryest, or the second goryest non-fatality special move in the game right after Baraka's knife-slice attack, she's just kind of built to juggle people to death.

Most of her combos are maybe three hits, sometimes four, and you can kiss half your life bar. Goodbye. Yeah. She's one of those characters who can jump kick and then just throw a projectile and that that'll hit you too. And if, you know, if she does it right, she can maybe do something else or like do something else into the jump kick and then throw the thing. So it's, yeah, she can do a lot of damage in a short amount of time. And it's just a stunned move, then she gets a free combo. So yeah, she is, she has a lot of potential. And I must say her twin sister, Malina, I always found her very hard to control just because all her moves were like charged, but not like, not like a guile. move. It's like, you literally hold the button down and let them go, which I found very complicated and hard to use. But of course, the computer doesn't do that, so the computer can just hit you whatever it wants. So it's actually, it's just one move with the Sightas. But to your point, you do kind of always want to be holding high punch, because if anyone jumps at you, you just pop up, release that button, and they're going to be back on the ground. And the others, you know,

her roll and her teleport kick were just regular inputs. But because she can, break out most of those moves at the drop of a hat, especially if you're almost perpetually charging the Saitos, she is the top tier in the game. She is a monster if, you know, played in the right hands. But you, you know, you chose your words well, David, because she is literally a monster. When you see her pull the mask down, she's got like a baraka face. So it's like, it's very clever. And again, we're not getting to it, but there's a huge story reason as to why she looks at Katana, but she's not actually a twin. She's some sort of like genetic experiment slash monster baby, whatever.

I feel like with Mortal Kombat 1, you know, Boone and Tobias has started this trend with Scorpion of, hey, what if a character takes off their face and there's something else? And in this game, you know, Molina takes off a face and reptile takes off a face. And it's just like, what are these people really? It's just another kind of layer of mystique and intrigue around fatalities and characters and who and what they really are. It was pretty cool.

I do like the fact that Malina can take off her mask and just basically inhale you and then spit out your bones. That's a nice fatality. Not as bloody as you would think, just a big old pile of bones. Well, you know what? She doesn't waste any, she doesn't waste, you know? She takes it all. She's very efficient. Yes. She eats your clothes.

She even eats your clothes. Speaking of clothes, let's talk about Kung Lao. Kung Lao is a character is actually referenced in the first game in the text of the attract mode, but she didn't get to see him. He was, you know, he was a legendary warrior who defeated Goryo century.

years ago, but now he's here, and what you're fighting, what you're playing as, is a Kung Lao who's a descendant of that Kung Lao, played by a man named Anthony Marquez, and you brought this up last time, David, but he was supposed to be in Mortal Kombat 1, because he was part of this crew, this clique of martial artists, but he was, like, hurt or just he was unavailable, and he couldn't be in Mortal Kombat 1, but like, okay, Mortal Kombat 2, you're in dude, you're in Kunglau now, and we're giving you a real badass hat, and we're giving you the coolest fatality in the entire game, okay? And he said, okay. Yeah, he could have gone down as maybe the ninjas and Kung Lao, but Kung Lao absolutely has my favorite fatality

MK2. The slice where you just cut you in half and you fall over and like do a, almost like a banana peel split when you hit the ground is just awesome. I got to say, I would like it more if he didn't do the pose or his arms out after he did it. Because that's why I prefer the hat. decapitation because when he catches the hat he just stands up like a badass the split is good Kung Lauer is probably my favourite character in this game he's just too cool

looking not to like he's got too many cool moves as well like getting around with this guy is an absolute breeze to be honest I mean they still get absolutely destroyed but you can teleport you can do that spinny thing which it's like a zoning thing you can throw projectiles

high low you know he's really good He's a great character, and yeah, he just looks really cool, so I like him a lot. He's one of my favorite Mortal Kombat characters, period. Yeah, really his pose, where he's kind of showboating is as an aspect of his character they leaned into later. He's kind of the ken to Lou Kang's Ryu. You know, Lou Kang is a laser-focused, deadly serious, and Kunlau has an ego and some attitude. I know slightly off topic, but in the much more recent Mortal Kombat movie, I did enjoy Kung Lao appearing there. and they let him do something with his hat that was absolutely disgusting.

I mean, in Mortal Kombat, God, I want to say X, he's got the most horrific fatality where he throws the hat down and it stays there like a buzzsaw. Yeah, yeah, that's in the movie. And then he grabs you by the legs and, is that what he does? Yeah, almost. I think it's similar, but, like, his hat's in place and he, like, ride someone into it in the movie.

Yeah, it's like crying first just in half. It's vile. Yeah. That's Mortal Kombat 9, which does have... No, it's 9, okay. Well, I bring it up because there are other fatalities in that game. We won't have to get into all of them. But, like, that is the game that probably has made me wince more than any other Mortal Kombat game

where the fatalities actually look really painful and not just over the top. Oh, speaking of painful fatalities, let's talk about Jax. Jacks is a character who, again, might have been in the first game. They had a character in mind called Stryker, but Stryker eventually morphed into Jacks. And there's a funny story behind this, so Jacks is the first black character. He's played by a man named John Parrish, with two R's, by the way.

Okay. No relation, Jeremy. And John Parrish was a weightlifter and a bodybuilder, ex-military guy. He was a trainer in the club where Daniel Pascena and all those guys were worked out. And apparently, because he was in with all these guys, he was playing Mortal Kombat 1 when, you know, early on.

And he pointed out, I was like, hey, there's no black people in your game. So he got the privilege of being the first black person in the game. The way they designed him, the way he looks, he just looks like a really strong guy. Like his outfit is very simple, but he just looks like a really buff, strong dude. And both of his fatalities, I feel like, reflect that. He can crush your head, which I'm wondering, because this is 1993, given the fact that the people who make Mortal Kombat are all nerds, Do you think at that point they've already seen the story of Ricky, which came out, and I want to say, 1990? God, that's a good point.

Because that famously has a man crush another man's head with his hands, and that's exactly what Jack says in this game. Yeah, I mean, probably, to be honest. Yeah, I mean. It's possible. Sorry, I apologize for this little brain fart, but he does have the metal arms in this game, right? No. That's three. No, it doesn't. Okay, my bad. I apologize. No, he is just a big man with big muscle arm.

but he can rip your arms off, which in, again, the other really brutal fatality. Yeah, one of my favorites, but also the one that makes me scratch my head the most, because they don't really appear to die at the end. Like, they're left standing kind of in this expression of agony while blood spurts out of their arm stumps, but it's kind of like, yeah, that would really hurt. Are they dead? I guess we can be led to believe that they bled out after the screen faded. Well, if it's 1993, then I want to say TimeKillers is already on the market,

and that is a game where you can lose both your arms, and you get to keep fighting. It's weird that they keep fighting when they're off-stats happen, because they're completely armless. Well, it's only a flesh wound. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, boy. Thank you, Stu. In all seriousness, though, if you win the match without arms and Time Killer, I believe you get a big bonus.

Unfortunately, you're still playing time killers. Let's talk about Shangsun, because Shangsun is now a playable character, but he's been given a complete makeover. He Nonga looks like just like the old man from Big Trouble Little China. He is now a younger, not young, but younger, played by a actual medical doctor, a man named Philip On. Instead of, because originally it was just Hohsong pack in old man makeup, but now they have this, you know, martial artist who's a doctor. Again, he knew everybody, so they didn't, they didn't try very hard when they cast his games. Who do you know who's also into this stuff? Oh, you know this guy?

He's a doctor? Great. Let's have him come in and become Shang-sung. So what I love about Shang-sung in this game is he only really has one move. He can throw the fireballs, which is what he did in the first game. But as a player, if you learn them, you know, it's all different moves. If you learn them, he can transform into every other regular character in the game. And to me, this is like expert mode.

Like, once you know all the characters, Moral Combat 2, you can play a Shang-sung, and you can basically be everybody. and you can do weird combos where you turn into one guy and then do another move. And it's just, to me, it is so much fun to show off, especially when it comes to fatalities, because if you transform, you can do all the fatalities in the game. So I would love to play this game, you know, against the computer. And, you know, once I got good at it enough, I would just go through it and I would just fatality, fatality, and just put on a show for anyone watching.

And it was just so much fun. You know, like the crowd would go wild because, you know, again, it's early on, unless they've been hanging out in the arcades all the time. they probably haven't seen all these fatalities. So I would, I just had a blast doing that kind of stuff. I mean, he's got the most crowd-pleasing fatality and one of the most difficult ones to pull off, which is the Kintarim-off, right? I want to say hold high punch for 20 seconds.

I might be wrong on that one. I believe it's low punch. Low punch. I think it's low punch. But yeah, you have to hold it. You're basically, well, you're basically holding it for like a round and a half. So if you can still manage to pull that off, like skills, right? Respect.

I mean, yeah, he's great unless you're playing this on one of the CD ports like PS1, in which case is the biggest pain in the butt imaginable, because they have to do disc access every single time you transform. Yeah, loading is his second unique special move. I think that I would actually say that Shengsang can actually mix and match fatalities. One quirk of one of sub-zero's fatalities was that you had to first deep freeze the opponent before you could pull it off. And whereas normally you only had, I think, around like two seconds, maybe three to pull off a fatality, the deep freeze bought you a good like five or six seconds.

Yes. And if you messed up the second part of the fatality, you could just keep deep freezing endlessly. Well, if you were Shang Sung, you could morph into subzero, deep freeze them, keep doing that to kind of run the clock until you morph back to Shang Sun, then morph back to someone else and then do their fatality, which would cause the opponent, the frozen opponent, sometimes glitch. just appears like a spectrum of colors because you could go from like the deep freeze to like Kung Lao's, you know, hat slice or hat toss, any other fatality. So it's just kind of like a fun arcade crowd pleaser to mix and match fatalities that way. Yeah. And the funny thing about that is the deep freeze move, which and then he punches you to explode,

basically, that is essentially a sort of more graphic version of what they came up with for Sub-Zero in the Super Nintendo version, you know? Yes. Which I thought was very funny. Yeah, they definitely played to that. They took what was what was the, you know, the, you know, the bloodless, you know, censored, quote-unquote version that the Nintendo fans got. It's like, okay, you want to break someone? Here you go.

Now his guts come out. Which shows that, like, the idea, even on Super Nintendo was cool, it was just missing that Mortal Kombat flair and it definitely had that in MK2. Oh, cool. I made a sub-zero pun. All right. And I also want to reiterate one point is about about, about, Kato and Sonia, who are not in the game, but they're seen in the game, the bookkeeping screen actually had a counter that said Kano Transformations, which is a false, it's a false hint.

You cannot do that, but anyone who saw it believed you could, which helped people, you know, believe that you could, but it's a lot. You actually can't do that. But they put it in there to mess with people. Which just shows you how deep this rabbit hole goes. Like, most consumers would not have any means of accessing that menu. But if they did, or if an arcade operator was curious, Boone snuck that in there. And that combined with the

fiery character in the pit two background. I think that's hornbuckle or whatever they ended up naming. I'm always confusing with Hornswoggle in WWE, but I think it's hornbuckle. And that was a trend where, you know, Boone would tease things that were not in the game. And that's something he would

continue in Ultimate MK3, showing rain in the teaser, and rain was not in that. game. Yes. They actually created a completely fake character, put him in the intract mode, and it's just a lie. You can't, the character's not in the game. He would appear later in the game, but in that game, you can't play him. He's not even, he's never there. So the burning guy in the background of Pitt 2 is not Blaze. Oh, yeah, that might be Blaze, but I think there's, oh, you know what I'm thinking of? There is a pallet swap of that character who is not on fire and who has green stripes on his

leggings. I believe that's Horny. That's Hornswain. Yes. Yes. Yes. The son of Vince McMahon, okay. That's right. That's right. And the anonymous raw general manager. Yeah, yes. But speaking of backgrounds, we should also mention that by putting their characters in the background, they basically reused footage they had shot from earlier in Mortal Kombat 1.

And Elizabeth Maleky, who was Sonia in Mortal Kombat 1, didn't take kindly to the fact that her image was in Mortal Kombat 2, but she wasn't used in Mortal Kombat 2. And that'll come up later in this episode. Let's talk about those hidden characters, though. We mentioned them by name earlier. So Mortal Kombat 1 had reptile, not at first, but they put him in one of the revisions. So Mortal Kombat 2 has three hidden characters. There is smoke who is, I would just say, gray scorpion, except there's smoke coming off his body, like just he's constantly smoking, not like a cigarette.

Like his body is literally smoking. Has to be uncomfortable. You would think so? I assume it's coming from him and not his clothes, but I'm sure the lore masters know the answer for that. Yeah, as David mentioned earlier, the only way to fight him is to press down and start on the portal stage when Dan Forden appears and says Toasty,

which only happens some of the time. So it's a really rare occurrence. And in multiplayer. Yes. There's also Jade, who is basically green katana, She is a little easier, at least more predictable, because if you win one round using only low kick before that question mark stage, then you get to fight Jade. You go straight there. She's a little tricky to fight because she's immune to all projectiles, but once you know how to fight her, she's pretty to do.

And indeed, if you pick the right character, you can even do a fatality as long as it only uses low kick, which I think, oh, it was funny. Meanwhile, there's also the incredibly hidden, you know, to David's point earlier, I don't think, you know, when they put this character in the game, I don't think they told anyone else until it was already out there, the character called Noob Saibot. And yes, if you read that correctly, that is Boone and Tobias backwards, Noob Saibat. And the other joke is that he's basically a black ninja and that he is literally all black, which means he's very hard to see on the background. Yeah. But the only way to face him, which is this is amazing, you have to win 50 matches in a row. So is that in-versus or looping the arcade ladder or got to be versus? I mean, no matter what, if it is versus, that's expensive, right? That's an expensive pursuit. Yeah, it definitely had to be versus because I believe, like, the counter has to read 50 and it resets once you beat the game.

That's so... Yeah, incredibly expensive. Very expensive. I think I only faced him on Super Nintendo, and that was just me beating, like, plugging into controllers and having another player sit there for 50 matches and then fighting New Sidebot. And as mentioned earlier, he is one of those characters who has an incredible back history that we're just not going to get into, but believe it or not, this guy that

was obviously created as a joke, it's like, what if we just made a Black Ninja and what if we named it after ourselves? No, no, no, no. He's so much more than that. And I'll leave it to you to research that on your own because it is actually a funny story. Well, let me touch on one aspect of his development history, which is a much shorter stories. So after Mortal Kombat 1 and Reptile was added, John Tobias discovered reptile along with everyone else. Because what happened is he had just given Boone some color palettes and said, here, if we need these, we can use them for the ninjas.

So Boone created this green and black ninja. And John Tobias went to him afterwards. He wasn't upset, but he's just like, hey, if you tell me about these secret characters, I can write some lore for them. And Boone was like, oh, yeah, sure, no, no problem. Definitely will. So they collaborated on Smok and Jade. But Noob Saibot was another Ed Boone prank that John Tobias later discovered. And, you know, Boone's little wink and nod was not only a secret character, but their names spelled backwards.

So I just love that one of the co-creators had to discover, had to discover this along with everyone else. So this is a dumb question, but the purpose of fighting these characters, presumably, is just for a big score bonus, right? you must get a big bonus for being these or is it, I mean, I know it's for arcade, like, you know, for props or whatever, it's for like bragging rights, but you do get a bonus for fighting them, presumably. That was another, another big change. Mortal Kombat 2 dispensed with the score. It was just a win counter.

Okay. Yeah. There were no points. Yeah. I was thinking of remembering the first one, but yeah, yeah, that's, that's it. Okay. That's interesting then, yeah. It was really more for, like, not only the arcade bragging rights, like you said, Stuart,

but I think it was just, Mortal Kombat to me is kind of the game embodiment of journey, not destination. Like, you find these characters, and they completely wipe you out. But just discovering them or hearing about them and then finding them, it was just kind of gratifying to know that it was true. And it also got you more excited about what else could be hidden in this game. Right. For every real secret, I think we all imagined ten fake secrets. Yeah. Yes. So, not secret, but unplayable, are the two boss characters. First of all, they decided, okay, well, we liked Goro, but let's make a new Goro.

And let's call him Kintaro, which is also a vaguely Japanese name. He's also Tiger Striped. I believe officially he is Goro's dad, and he is just gigantic. It's like if Goro was big, he is huge, massive, ginormous, just a beast. He's cool as hell. He's cool as hell. He's probably one of my favorite boss character. I just love the Tiger Striped design.

Yeah, so cool. And also really, this is where even more world building begins. So in Mortal Kombat 1, Endurance Match 3 always takes place in Goro's lair because you fight Goro next. And the screen during Endurance Match 3 would kind of shake and you'd hear something really big walking around above you. And then Goro would just drop down. In Mortal Kombat 2, when you fight Cantaro and Shaqan, you fight them in Khan's arena and the crowd just goes nuts whenever Kintaro or Shaqan score a hand. hit. And it's really like if the speakers are loud, you feel like you are in the middle of a gladitorial arena and the crowd is just dead set against you. It was just a really, really cool

text that showed not only really great storybuilding, but just Dan Forden's brilliance with the audio design of these games. And since you mentioned him, let's talk about Shaq Khan. Shaqan is indeed the last boss of this game. He is a very large muscular man, and he was played by a very large muscular man, competitive bodybuilder Brian Glynn, who, was apparently recommended by John Parrish. He doubles as the narrator of the game. You know, he's the guy saying fatality and finish him. But that's not Branglin. That voice is by Steve Ritchie, who is a member of the staff. Shalkon also loves to mock you. He just throughout the game, he will say things insult you when you're fighting him. He points at you. He laughs at you. And he's got to, I must say, Steve Ritchie has a fantastic laugh. These are just, these are great evil laugh, I got to say. Yeah, I really love the narrator. Like, his work in Mortal Kombat 2 is probably my favorite. That's where we got a lot of stuff, like, outstanding. You're just this booming voice, and I really always liked, you know, continuing the turn

for Mortal Kombat 1, that you felt like someone was watching you and judging it the whole time. And then then was going to go, you know, oh, okay, good job. And then, you know, step down from his throne and just kick your ass. So in carrying over the fatalities from the first game, Mortal Kombat 2 kind of just says, okay, what if we just did more of that? So in Mortal Kombat 2, everyone has two fatalities now, except for Sheng Song. Shengg has three fatalities because that's just who he is.

There are three stages where you can do special stage fatalities, but none of them are as simple as the first game where you just uppercut them off the ledge. No, you have to do a special command or hold a button down, and it's just, it's, again, it's a secret thing where it's like you see the stage, you know you have to do something, but until you know how to do it, you can't do it. but the computer can do it to you very easily to let you know that you can do it, which is always funny. And I must say, I always thought that the pit two was a huge improvement on the first one because, you know, the first one was definitely, you know, the first time you saw it, it was horrific, and it's like, oh, God, the spikes down there. But for the pit two, you get a special animation of your opponent just falling to their death

and, like, the camera changes position, and they're falling onto a flat background, and they hit the ground. and it's not exactly gross, but it is bloody, and I feel like it's very effective. It's like, oh, they fell and, oh, they're dead now. That's them, they're dead. Yeah, I also, I loved that camera change because this was around the time when 3D fighting games

were starting to creep in, and it was just kind of a cool, like, pseudo-3-D view that, I think that's why people really remember that fatality. You really got the sense of the character falling and kind of flailing around like, no, oh, no, this is not going to be good. And then just that satisfying, like, crack when they hit. Again, it wasn't over the top.

In Mortal Kombat 3, they would have exploded into like 10 million skulls in ribcages. But in this, they just looked dead and broken, and it was really effective. Absolutely. The Deadpool had a pit of acid. You can put them in the pit of acid, and then you turn into a skeleton, which I just... It's such a cool sprite. I love it. It is.

And there's a way to make the narrator say something, but he doesn't say any words in English that I can recognize. It's just like a sound, like, oh, oh. I don't know what it means, but there's a way to make the narrator say that, which is just funny. And likewise, the stage, I didn't look up the name, but there's a stage with spikes in the ceiling, and you can hit them, you can uppercate your opponent into the spikes. And then I think if you pull down on the sticks, they will slide off the spikes very slowly and grunt when they hit the ground, which is just, again, it's just funny. Yeah, it's going both sticks. It's like an Eastererick, it's both sticks, right? You pull down on both sticks, right? You pull down on both. I love that.

It's like you're grabbing hold of them and pulling them down yourself. Yeah, I always had to. like, as a kid, this was very important to me. I was never sure whether I wanted to to make them slip off or not, because if they slipped off, they didn't, like, bleed all over the floor afterwards. I really, I really liked that. Also, I think the stage name was kind of

appropriate. It was either the tomb or the combat tomb. And this was kind of, this was a hidden thing as well, because what you were playing, you didn't see the spikes above. It was basically an inverted pit one, which was kind of another Easter egg, like, oh, there are spikes up there? Like, it was just another secret.

So is it just a matter of winning with an uppercut? No, no, it's in, yeah, that was always one thing that kind of disappointed me. Like, I kind of felt that, like, the pit one was cool because you could just win for an uppercut. So it was a great way to show people that, first of all, there was more to these stages than met the eye. Second, there were death moves in this game, even though it actually didn't count as a fatality. You didn't get bonus points or have the announcer say fatality. It's the easiest to pull off of all the fatalities, like, technically.

Yeah, yeah. So I never really liked the stage fatalities having different. inputs, but, you know, it's been a thing ever since. I mean, compared to what's coming, it's really next to nothing in terms of excess, you know. Yeah, yeah. But, of course, you don't have to kill your opponent. You can do nice things for your opponent. There is two new finishers that do not kill.

The first is the babality, and it turns your opponent into a little crying baby. And they're all special, you know, individual sprites. they're all pretty cute in Baraka with a big monster face though I do remember there was at least one revision of the game that got patched out at some point where you could do the babality and then cancel your animation and then you could actually attack the baby and then it would just explode into like a bloody mess

not you would actually see a baby but like the baby Sprite would disappear and blood would appear so we just said oh we killed the baby but that's not what happened at all but it was a funny glitch that's a glitch yeah thank God and even sillier but also more elaborate was the friendship where you just do something nice or weird or maybe you just

dance. It's they vary wildly from character character. I feel like the ninjas all use the exact same gag where they hold up a doll and they say, oh, buy a sub-zero doll, buy a scorpion doll. I thought that was disappointing. They all had the same one. But Kid Thunder. Kid Thunder is a great one. Raiden just makes a small version of himself and it says, Kid Thunder. And that's just, it's just funny. I like that one. And those were a little sort of dig in the ribs of the whole controversy. I weren't they? It's like, look, look, we're not doing a vitality.

We're doing nice things. It's a little, it's fun. It's like sardonic. I quite like it. It's also the community kind of adopted as a way to just kind of in your face when they would beat you. Because remember, like, you have to, you have to meet very specific conditions. There are certain buttons you can't use during the wedding round. So if you get beaten by a babality or friendship, it's kind of the other player's way of saying,

I didn't even need all the buttons to beat you. Yeah, it's like a humiliation. I like that. Right. Well, that's, it's, as you said, Stu, that's what they called it in, oh, my God. Killer Instincts. Killer Instinct, yes. Killers, they have the humiliation where you make your opponent dance.

But this is just like you, they don't do anything. You do something, and they just sort of keep their dizzy animation and just no reaction while you laugh. I thought it was nice. They brought them back for 11. Yeah, I did too. Also, I have to say, Stu. revealed his friendship at the top of this podcast when he complimented my

book. That was Thu's friendship move. It was, yeah. I assume, David, your friendship is signing copies of your book and then throwing them at us. Yes, yes, and free of charge. That's the friendly part. But unfortunately, when the book hits me, I turn into ten skulls

and die. That's what happens. That's what's going to happen with my book because it's vast. You could use it as a murder weapon. that should be on the back can... Yeah, this book can be used as a metal weapon, the Phillies. Not the band.

Retronauts is taking over Long Island Retro Gaming Expo. I mean, there will be other non-retronauts-affiliated people there, too, but mostly, the show is all about retronauts and friends of retronauts. On Friday, August 11th, you can come see me, Jeremy Parrish, talk about the history of epoch game consoles with Kevin Bunch. That's epoch not epic. And on Saturday, you can see the main retronauts panel as I discussed the first decade of Metroidvania evolution with a whole slew of people in the main theater. Diamond Fight.

Nadia Oxford, Kat Bailey, Jared Petty. I don't know how they're going to cram us all into the main stage, but it's going to happen. And I know that everyone in the main panel will be presenting other talks that weekend, including separate presentations by Jared and Diamond, as well as an Acts of the Blood God presentation by Nadia and Kat, with guest appearances by me and Diamond.

What I'm saying is that if you like to hear Retronauts-related folks talk about old video games, you're going to want to attend Long Island Retro Gaming Expo at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Long Island, New York, August 11th, 12, and 13th. And when you're not attending our presentations, you can check out tons of amazing free-play retro games in an amazing museum in the coolest space ever devoted to retrogaming. Seriously, you should go. It's August 11th through 13th, and it's going to be rad. But really, that's kind of Mortal Kombat, too. You know, as we set at the top, I feel like it's an incredible improvement on the first one.

I feel like it exudes confidence in every way. It really shows a lot of growth. And really, you know, if you compare it to, you know, Street Fighter 2 launched in 1991, and Capcom basically kept making Street Fighter 2 until 1994, just making new versions of it, the fact that Mortal Kombat 1 came out in 92, and Mortal Kombat 2, with this much upgrade and change, came out a year later. To me, as an arcade goer at the time, I thought that really stood out as a dramatic contrast. Like, wow, Street Fighter 2 has barely changed, but look at this brand new Mortal combat a year later. This is incredible. I felt like I was the luckiest little kid in the world

that I could just play this game. It's easily one of the greatest sequels of all time. I mean, this was the game that, as you said, Diamond, really started to steal players away from Street Fighter 2. because, you know, by this time, I think they were up to maybe Turbo, which is actually my favorite version of SF2, but that's kind of where it peaked. I was not interested in the other upgrades, whereas Mortal Kombat, they were adding numbers. You know, returning characters had new looks. There were new characters. There were new secrets.

It was, it gave you something to really look forward to and get excited about. And the other thing that got excited about Mortal Kombat 2 is that when it came home, eventually, this was the game that Nintendo is like, okay, fine, whatever. We like money more than we like pretending that we're some kind of moral high ground. So go ahead. So if you bought Mobile Climate 2 on Super Nintendo, you got to kill your opponent. All the blood is there. All the fatalities are there. You know, the sprites aren't quite as big.

The sound isn't quite as good as the arcade. But I feel like otherwise, the Superdindo port of Mortal Kombat 2 is pretty faithful in that lets you do all the stuff that the arcade version does. It's a great port. I'm a Megadry guy, but it is... It's great. The depth of color and everything is just superb, and the speed of it's great. It's a really impressive port, I think. So, yeah, I completely agree.

So for another book, Arcade Perfect, about Arcade to Home conversions, I talked to the one and only programmer who converted MK2 on Super Nintendo. And, you know, he felt like, like, obviously, sculptured software had a lot of pressure because the Super Nintendo version of that first game, for myriad reasons, was not good. so when Midway Williams Midway actually played it

they actually sent him a letter via fax and he sent me a scan of it or they actually congratulated him and said this is like the definitive version of the game on 16-bit systems the Mega Drive version

did end up out selling it probably because of the momentum from the first game but there was a very clear winner here if you played them both so what is the I mean taking aside like the disc accessing problems and such

would the best home version technically be the PC version if you had a controller? So, yeah, very specifically, Adam Clayton was the programmer. He was commended for the best 16-bit version. The best version overall, and I had this one too, was definitely the DOS version. I think the major change to it, I don't think all of the...

I think the soundtrack was different because of different midis. But otherwise, in terms of graphics, sound effect, no loading time for morphs and things like, that. That was the best version. The problem was back then, there were really wonky PC controllers. Like, there was no standard and there was no good one. Like, I didn't like the Gravis game pad because the buttons were kind of sunken, so it was hard to hold two at once with your thumb. And there were only four. So you had to hold two for block. But, you know, playing on the keyboard, actually,

a lot of pro-MK players still play with the keyboard to this day. So I really like playing with the keyboard. Yeah, yeah, with the numpad and searcher. You can buy that, I think, on Gog as well. I'm not I think it's still up there. But it was on Gogh, yeah, along with trilogy as well. So, Stu, you said the magic word trilogy. That means there is indeed Mortal Kombat 3. And it arrived in April of 1995. The movie, by the way, launched that August. So by the time this game comes out, people are already talking about the movie. People are already hyped in the movie. Really, 1995, like, all year long was basically a long, a stretch of Mortal Kombat hype in general. If you play the game,

it says the movie's coming out soon so they really were you know putting all their eggs together like here we go you all wanted this here's the new mortal combat game let's do this yeah the hype for this one was crazy there's a commercial like a magazine ad that stuck in my head for all these years from eGM or something which is literally just nothing nothing can prepare you the repetition of nothing like when i was a kid i was like well this is is obviously going to be the greatest thing ever produced by human. So, yeah, but that stuck with me big time. Yes, so building up off of two into three, they've gone even further with the story.

Again, you get another very dramatic attract mode with Mortal Kombat 3, giving you an entire story outline. So somehow, you know, despite all this outright cheating, Chalkan loses Mortal Kombat again, and he doesn't like it again. He's still unhappy with this. So, and this is really weird, and I'm not going to explain this because I can't explain it. So he has a queen named Sindel, and she died like 10,000 years ago, but he has her resurrected on the earth, which somehow qualifies Shao Khan to join her on the earth in some sort of weird, like, immigration technicality? I don't know how this works, but because he resurrects her, he gets to join to the earth, now he's.

allowed to be on Earth, which means it allowed to invade the Earth. So, whereas Mortal Kombat 2 took place in Outworld, Mortal Kombat 3 takes place on Earth after Shaoqan has invaded and wiped out most of the population. So you get, you know,

sort of familiar scenes, but everything is kind of ruined and there's garbage and there's like, you know, rubble, and you know, some stages have like regular things, but they'll be like, there'll be skulls on the ground. So Yeah, you mentioned that the garbage, there's that stage where you've literally got newspaper and such blowing across the screen.

Yeah, it's really, really cool. The street just has garbage in the street. Which I got to say, like, right off the bat, before we start talking about, like, ups and downs, I feel like this decision, I think, hurts the game right from the get-go because two gave you this sort of exotic, weird fantasy land. Like, what's Outworld like, whatever we say it's like? Whereas Moral Combat 3 is like, what if we're in Chicago? What if we're in the bank? It's literally a stage called The Bank, and it's a bank. It's just, I don't know.

No, I'm completely with you. Mortal Kombat 3, and we'll get more into this, but it's actually pretty divisive. And one reason for, is the stages. Like, on the one hand, John Tobias and John Vogel were experimenting with a lot of 3D elements. So there are some 3D elements to stages like, like the. subway like the street with the papers blowing around but on the other hand you're fighting on a street I mean it's a street you know I I think in this game personally I'm quite fond of this game as look I think it does go for a slightly more realistic appearance here and a darker

and dingier appearance and what it reminds me of is like contemporary image comics like spawn the use of color and such um it's not exactly as vivid as that but that's the impression I get that that's what they're kind of going for that sort of darker comic book style that was popular at the time what I find interesting

is the way that the game has this slightly more realistic look yet everything else about it is so much more outlandish and silly because this game is bizarre like some of the imagery is just weird as hell way more than in one or two I think

and well we'll get into it but that's the reason why while it's not my favourite I could watch the fatality demonstration over and over again and I have done So, one of the main, I must say, going to, I must say, going into this, you know, we can't complain about Mortal Kombat 3. We can point out

what worked and what didn't work. You have to get them props. They were not sitting on their laurels. They went for it. They decided we're doing Mortal Kombat 3, and we're not just going to make Mortal Kombat 2 again. We're going to change stuff around. And part of that change involved giving a brand new

button. There's actually a sixth button on this thing, and it's the run button. And it lets you run forward for a few seconds, maybe. And there's a meter that literally, there's a new meter that sort of quickly ticks down and comes back up. and if you run at your opponent, you can combo them. This is the first game that actually gives you an on-screen counter,

and it actually displays what you did and give you a combo. But unlike the, you know, other games that are out there, these are very specific chains of commands you enter, and then you do a very specific animation that knocks your opponent down. So you kind of have to know what you do it. You can, of course, string together moves and do something creative, and you'll, you know, you'll dual damage, absolutely. But if you run into them and you press certain buttons,

like that's an official combo, I think even with a K, maybe. And sometimes the characters will, like, pull out, like, their weapons for combo strings, right? Just for a little quick animation. It's an interesting thing, I think. And it's interesting, but it's also, I guess, controversial is the word, because some people view this as just kind of too, limiting. Like, instead of making all, instead of making all combos creative, discoverable in gameplay, you know, jazz, if you will, it's more like, it's more like a fatality. It's like,

oh, if you run forward and you press high punch, low punch, high punch, low punch, then you do a bunch of things and you knock your opponent away. But if you do four high punches, it doesn't work. You do, you do two moves and then you just stop. So, you know, sorry, I know I'm chipping in out of sort of relative ignorance, but they're sort of dialer combos, as they would call them, right? Like, you have to put these specific things in, you can't really flow into your own sort of combo. Because the later

games, like the Deadly Alliance trilogy, they use the same principle of dial-a-comboes where you just hit like triangle, triangle, circle, and then maybe switch stands, you could then hit square, but other than that, you're completely locked into that combo. There's no free

creativity there, so to speak, which of course means there is loads of creativity, because this fan base is nuts. But, But, you know what I'm, you get what I'm saying. These are very, like, restrictive kind of combos. They're not a organic kind of combo system at all. So there was an element to this that was introduced in Ultimate MK3, which we'll talk about a little later.

But the problem was that this was around the time when a lot of fighting games were kind of throwing up barriers, maybe unwittingly in some ways, to the casual crowd. The problem with the dial of combos back then is we didn't have a context list. in our smartphones. We didn't have smartphones. We didn't have speed dial. If you don't know my phone number, you can't call me. If you don't know the dial combo, you are at a very big disadvantage. And one of Mortal Kombat's most appealing characteristics, especially compared to Street Fighter 2 in the Alpha series, Alpha was a little more casual, but it definitely, the entire

franchise was catering more to an expert player base, was that, yes, if you know a character better than I do, you'll win. But the playing field was still pretty even. You know, that's why all the characters have the same basic punches and kicks differentiated only by their special moves and how they can add to juggle. So it did feel more restrictive than Mortal Kombat 1 did. Like, if you're sub-zero in MK3, you can still freeze me and do an uppercut. But if I come at you with a seven-hit, 42% damage combo with Shiva, that's a lot more than an uppercut. And you're kind of just going to feel a little shut out. Exactly.

The punishment is not equal in any sense. You can't just figure it out. You have to know what to do it. There's no, there's no combo break here to, you know, to borrow the phrase from your instinct. Oh, God. No, that wasn't introduced in the franchise until Deception, aka MK6. So once you were in, especially juggle combos, touch of death combos, where if one started, you were dead, you lost the round. I mean, once you were in, you just kind of had to sit back and watch and hope you'd break out and be able to get some licks in.

Speaking of prolonged specific commands, one of the new gimmicks of Mortal Kombat 3 is what are called combat codes with K's, of course, and at the versus screen of any match, there are these little boxes on the bottom of the screen, and Player 1 and Player 2 have to work together, and by pushing buttons on their respective sides, they change the symbols in those boxes, and each combat code has a different effect. and these effects do lots of different things. They can be as simple as turning off throws. They can be as complex as all the characters change every few seconds. They can be as weird as, you know what? Now we're playing Gallagher. And I thought what was funny about these combat codes is that they tied directly into the marketing because every ad for World Combat 3 could include in the margins just little like handwritten notes.

And it's like, what is this thing? A skull, a ying yang. those were all hints at combat codes that you could then play and try in the arcades were they useful? I don't know but it was like one more way to sort of distill information and few more rumors and get people wondering how this works and what it does.

I do like the idea of combat codes but I think they feed into the whole idea of freezing out new players to be honest in a way though of course you would have to coordinate with another player and other to enter these codes in the first place wouldn't you? Yeah. Maybe you could put in the code that turns off run and just play a better game.

I think that was the big thing. It was a double-edged sword where there were no combat codes that only one player could use because that wouldn't be fair. If the other player didn't know the combat code or you were trying to tell them, hey, press these buttons and they didn't have time, it was something you could just easily miss. Where it really came into play was there was a combat code. The most popular was to turn off throwing. There were a lot of arcades where it was kind of a tacit rule. No throwing. Throwing is cheap.

It's too powerful. Don't use that stuff. So players in the know would often turn off throwing and just rely on special moves, basic attacks and combos. There's also, this might be, is the ultimate combat code only from ultimate all the combat? Correct. Yes. Right.

Okay. We'll get into that later than. Well, well, there's a combat code and then an ultimate combat code. You did enter a combat code at the end of MK3 and you could unlock cyber smoke. so yes right that was the big that's like after any at the end of any game it would show this big screen and it was 10 boxes in a row so you actually had to operate both joysticks on each side and like a madman tap a bunch of buttons up and down up and down really really fast and then you would unlock but once you did that smoke was permanently unlocked on that cabinet so that was a nice touch a nice touch once you knew

what to do so i remember like once that game you know once i knew that the code, I would, like, travel, you know, I would travel, you know, walk the earth, and wherever I saw a MK3 cabinet, I'd be like, is smoke open? No, let me free smoke for you. And people would say in Hush, whispers, there they are, the, the one who makes smoke happen. I love that. This is a true story. When this game came out on Super Nintendo, I had the smoke code, and I walked into a local game store called Dr. Game.

and the proprietor was this like this is a great name. The proprietor was this teenage kid and I mentioned that I knew the smoke code and he was like, you are a god and yeah, that makes you feel pretty good. This was actually, just to get into this briefly, this was Midway's biggest marketing push ever, I believe.

This was highly coordinated. They wanted Mortal Kombat 3 arcade out in the spring of 95, the home version six months later, an upgrade for the arcades to appease arcade operators who wouldn't have the nine to 12 month interval between console versions

and they were building up to the movie and they came up with combat codes some exclusive to the coin up, some exclusive to the home version. They were meeting those out to journalists and certain intervals. This was a huge push, but it was also the stage

where John and Ed were really kind of feeling the burn of basically being a Mortal Kombat factory for several years. I mean, I'm not surprised given how this, I mean, this game is just like an ultimate. It's just so much stuff thrown at it. It's like throwing everything possible

at the war. You know, it's ludicrous. And again, we'll get to it, but the fatalities in this game are just so stupid. They're terrible. In an entertaining way, but it kind of breaks the universe in a sense to have this tone

clash. But, you know, again, we'll get to it. I don't want to distract at this point. Well, before we talk about how these people kill each other, we have to talk about who these people are. And do that, we have to talk about the fact that there was a major cast shakeup, which led to many character changes. And this is, I would say, the downside to the Mortal Kombat formula.

You know, in Street Fighter, Capcom can make. make all the games they want, starring Rue and Ken and Chinle. And Rue and Ken and Chinle are never going to complain about how they're portrayed in these games. But because Mortal Kombat featured real performers with their real faces and their names were there too, there was some friction between the makers of the game and the people who were actually in the game. And really, to start with that, we have to start with Daniel Pascena.

And I feel like, David, you're probably the best one to tell the story because there's so much to tell about Daniel Pesina and Midway and Mortal Kombat. So while I was writing Longley Mortal Kombat Round 1, anytime my wife would come into my home office to find me with my head and my hands, she'd just say chapter 30, and I'd be like, yep, because this was the single most complicated chapter, to the point where I debated even writing it. Like, I wasn't sure if this book was the right form to air this, but as a Mortal Kombat fan, I felt like fans deserve the truth. So really, Dan Pucina had, he was upset about compensation, which I think was fair. He was blaming Ed Boone and John Tobias, but it wasn't their fault. They were also employees of Midway. Like, I think one thing people never realized is they never owned Mortal Kombat.

It was owned by Midway, now it's owned by Warner Brothers. They could kind of just do what they were able to do. And they went to bat for the performers saying, hey, they deserve better contracts. And Midway presented them with slightly better contracts. And Dan was one who turned it down. went on to sue them. But the problem with Dan started earlier during Mortal Kombat 2 when Ed Boone would get pretty frustrated at Dan kind of overstepping and trying to be how he now builds himself, which is a stunt coordinator and casting director of Mortal Kombat 2. And Ed, you know,

Ed would kind of pull John aside and say, I know this guy is your friend, but he needs to back off because we're trying to work here. And so John talked to Ed about this, but even some of the performers who I'll keep them nameless because they seem some of Dan's longtime friends would come up to John and say this guy's killing me here man I'm a martial artist I know what I'm doing and he needs to shut his mouth and there was no big blow up but basically John and Ed decided okay he's not coming back for Mortal Kombat 3 we don't really need them we could cast almost anyone at this point because after two games they they had their digitization process down pat So Dan sued, claimed he was a co-creator, claimed all sorts of things, and the court returned a summary judgment, which is essentially in favor of the defendants, which were Midway, Williams, Nintendo of America, Sega of America. I believe there was one more, but that was the main, yeah, the main group. And they basically said, you know, no, this guy doesn't own anything. He didn't create anything. He was, you know, following instructions. and Dan has said he's kind of, he has backstage footage, which was given to him by John Tobias,

who admits he was too young to know any better, that this wasn't really his to give away, right? It wasn't his. It was Midway's property technically. But Dan will show select clips of this behind the scenes footage to kind of portray himself as something he was not. But, you know, I dug into this and I said, no, you know, everything Dan's saying is pretty much wrong. he was taking direction from Ed and John the whole time. Dan also likes to say that Ed was hardly involved and asked him and the others if he could get involved in the game he was co-creating.

And they said, sure, Ed, get over here. Ha, ha, ha. Ed was there the whole time. You can see it. There are screenshots I've taken from all the footage, which I have. A lot of the footage is out there showing this, but Dan just selectively doesn't show it. Or sometimes he does show it, but tries to pretend that what everyone can see is not there.

So this diamond sounds like an interesting show. Yeah. I really went down this rabbit hole. The more interviews with him I watched, the more podcast, what I listened to, he was making up stuff that just wasn't true, and that was very easy to disprove. And I even say, like, I end the chapter by saying, like, this guy's legacy was secure. He's the face of Johnny Cage. He was the face, you know, the masked face, but still the face of the ninjas.

But that just kind of wasn't enough. And there are some people who, some of the other cast, because Dan is this cult of personality who kind of hits their wagon to his star. And it's really, I've even had some of the cast come to me and say, because of Dan, a lot of us will never be able to work with Warner Brothers. So he's kind of costing us opportunities, which I think is half true. I mean, they're the ones who have chosen to stuck with him. But yeah, it's a whole thing. And all of this happened. there was a rumor for years that that Dan was kind of booted from the Mortal Kombat games

because he was doing advertising for other companies. That happened after John and Ed had decided, hey, we got to cut ties with this guy. You know, even John was like, he's still my friend, but we can't work with him. It's just too much of a hassle. So this was a whole thing, and it had never really come out before. And this chapter, which you can read on Aris Technica, came out on, October 8th of last year on the 30th anniversary, which I regret the timing was out of my hands, but I didn't want to be perceived as happy anniversary.

Here's, I'm going to rain on your parade. But it was definitely very, very quickly. My phone blew up. My Twitter DMs blew up with people who either believed me or people who very vocally did not, and I was the worst. And it was a whole thing. It's horrible. Yeah.

And it was, you know, I have. A ton of citations. I backed up everything, but I have no ill will toward Dan Piscina. I just think that one of the problems, the reason he's been able to spread these tall tales is because I think a lot of the enthusiast press and influencers will just kind of repeat anything that they're told, especially by, in fairness, you know, Dan seems to be an authority. Like, he was there.

He was in the marketing. He was, you know, they're behind the scenes videos and stills. So why wouldn't they believe him? but there was just really no fact-checking done. It sounds a little bit like he's got that sort of Tommy Tahririco delusion of the egotism going on. Yeah. You know, I'm not saying that for a fact because I don't want to make any unsubstantiated claims about this show.

For sure. I've thought a lot about this, too, and I wouldn't want to diagnose them publicly. But, you know, you can connect the dots pretty easily, I think. But I just think that there are a lot of people who, still hold him in high esteem. In fact, I've been invited on a lot of fan podcasts to talk about the book, with the caveat that we can't talk about Dan Pesina because he's our friend. And I'm like, my perspective is if you care about Mortal Kombat as much as you claim to,

you should want to know the truth about the history of the franchise and that making games is always hard and often there's some ugliness involved. And that's... It's a shame because he seems like otherwise probably pretty interesting guy to hurt, you It's just a shame that there's this, that ugliness there, as you say. Yeah. It sort of taints the whole thing a little bit. It does.

And I think the problem is once I kind of, you know, cross-reference all this stuff and realize, you know, 99% of it was false, I kind of realized I can't ever believe anything this guy says. Like, is he a nice guy? Is he, you know, I don't know. I don't know. I don't want to, obviously, I'm not going to speak for you at all because I didn't write this book.

I don't know what your process is or how you, how are you. write, how you feel when you're right. But I don't, I mean, you don't want to write something that destroys someone. Do you? Like, you don't want to do that, but you do want to tell the truth. So that's a huge, that's a difficult, um, balancing act, I think, as you've said. It was very difficult. Even, even now, which is fine, but I get anxious because I'm like, I don't like, I'm one of those people. I want everyone to like me. And I really don't want to, to hurt anybody. But it was not malicious. I think, He said humbly that I feel like if you read the chapter, it is very fair, but I just have to point out all these discrepancies and go, look, this does not make any sense.

And let me tell you why, you know. Well, I certainly want Danubezina to be my friend because, let's face it, if he was my enemy, he would destroy me. He's a professional martial artist, and I can't do anything against that. Right. He did it with a shadow kick. Throw fireballs. Keep your distance. But as we brought up earlier, we made a joke about Time Killers.

So Time Killers was followed up by Bloodstorm. And that was one of the games that Daniel Pocina famously appeared in print Everhouse's Four, basically dressed as Johnny Cage. So he was hyping that game. And I think at the time, a lot of us assumed that he did that and then got fired. But no, by the time he was doing that, he was already not invited back, which is why he was doing stuff like that. can I make one of my iconic stewardship interjections briefly

Bloodstorm is the Simpsons gag Bonestorm inspired by Bloodstorm or is it coincidence that's what I'd like to know I don't know by the Blood Storm has that vibe it has that vibe doesn't it

that edgy vibe I'd have to look at the timing of it all but I really feel like how many people in the Simpsons writers room knew about any video games that weren't like on the news you know Like, Bloodstorm was not a household name.

No. Moral combat was, Bloodstorm was not. So I'd be very curious to which came first. Did Bonesstorm precede bloodstorm or vice versa? But I had to look it up, and I don't know if it's top my head. I will say, it's just kind of an addendum to this, that I do feel, and it's still this way today, I do feel that the performers were poorly compensated. I mean, they're under the belief, even today, that they own their campaign.

characters. And I'm like, well, you don't. I mean, Michael Keaton doesn't own Batman. He just played him. So, like, for a long time, they, you know, would show up at conventions in costume, and they got cease and desist from Midway. And some of them are very upset about that. But I'm saying, look, you're, you're not Johnny Cage. You're not this. You're not that. Like, you can still, people know who you are today. You can still sign pictures and stuff. But you don't own these characters at the same time. Sees and desisting them for dressing up feels a bit harsh to me it does feel a bit harsh like it's cosplay right yeah it is it is cosplay do they see and d people for dressing up as harley quinn i don't think they do they it um it is hard

but i guess if you're making money out of it maybe that's some kind of maybe they're only sorkin they might yeah you think it's one of those legal things where if you don't exercise it you lose you lose the right like you know if you don't challenge these things you lose the copyright i i think it might be, I mean, that's to my point, right? Like, I don't feel they've ever been fairly compensated. I just think that they have blamed the wrong people. But it's a case in the industry even today. We've had performers, developers who are just not treated fairly. It's an entertainment thing, not even a game thing. You know, it's an industry, a labor thing. But I feel like they, for a long time, blamed the wrong people, and some of them still do. So Daniel Pistina was not the only

person who had this conflicts. As we intimated earlier, so Elizabeth Maleky, Dr. Philip on, and Catalan Zemir all ended up suing midway, and they basically sort of felt like Daniel Pesina was like the vanguard here. It's like, oh, he's suing, so we're also suing because we feel like we haven't been compensated properly. And they allege unauthorized use of their name, persona, home version, spin-off media, all this such. However, their lawsuit did not go very well. The court disagreed and sided with the defendants, which, you know, are the people who made moral combat, because they felt that in, you know, being photographed and then, you know, being animated, the characters are no longer them. They're just playing a part. And it's clearly

distinct from Elizabeth Leckley, ordinary human and Sonia Blade who can, you know, fly through the air and, like, you know, scissor kick you. Kiss you and then your head explodes. However, Hohsung Pack had a different issue. Hosung Pack really felt that Lukaang was based closely on himself because, as you might remember from our last episode, Hosung Pack was already a very celebrated martial artist before Moral Combat ever existed. He was like a black belt of the year caliber martial artist. So he sought damages on the grounds that this was, you know, these characters, this

character was based too much on him and too much of it is. image. He said it was misappropriation. And his case was settled out of court. So we don't know what happened, but it was not dismissed as it was the others, as like was the other cases. So there are a few factors there. I mean, one, I think he could make that argument and he did. But again, as we've talked about, a Mortal Kombat one, he's even dressed like Bruce Lee, sort of to enter the dragon, right? He's really playing Bruce Lee, playing Lou Kang. Also, Hosung Pack was a unique case where he had a lot more notoriety. He was arguably the most decorated competitive martial artist in the time, of the time, as you touched on.

He also was, not only did he play, I think he was the stunt double for Raphael and Ninja Turtle's 2, but he was also the stunt coordinator on that movie and Ninja Turtle's 3. The less said about that, the better. But he was due to appear in a named role in a Jackie Chan movie. He had a lot more star power. A lot of the basis of the legal arguments was that, hey, these, you know, Dan Pucina, Liz Maliki, Catalan Zamiar, Philippon, they can't say that they're famous for playing these characters because no one knows them from playing these characters. Yeah. But relative to them, Hosung Pack did have a lot more fame.

Right. So that was an issue in his case as well. So beyond this behind this behind the scenes drama, the actual roster of Moral Kombat 3 reflects a lot of differences from the first previous game. games. Obviously, with Pesina out, Johnny Cage is not there, but Raiden Scorpion are also missing. And from MK2, Baraka, Reptile, Katana, Molina are also not back. So you've got a huge chunk of the cast from Mortal Kombat 2, which was a very well-received game. There is not there. So it's kind of, again, it's funny, this is two years beforehand, but you can draw a lot of parallels between Mortal Kombat 3 and Street Fighter 3, and that here's your most, your highly

anticipated third chapter, and so much of the, you know, so many of the characters that people know and love just aren't there, which I think in hindsight may have been a big mistake. And it's cutting Scorpion is wild. Like, that's really wild. It was, as John Tobias described it to me, a very calculated risk. John Tobias and Ed Boone knew that, you know, four to six months down the line, they would be releasing an arcade update to MK3 that would include these characters. but they wanted to

this is actually something I love about Mortal Kombat I think that when you get a new street fighter game you can make very very good

guesses as to who will return but I like that in Mortal Kombat and this has worked into the lore your favorites may not always

be there I mean to Stu and Diamond's point you know they have not made the same

mistake sense of cutting a scorpion but I do love the fact that like there may not be a katana or a Molina or a Baraka or a Cano or a Sonia or et cetera in the next game. I think that is really bold of them, like how it's worked into the lore.

And I think that it kind of forces people to shake things up and try new characters. I mean, in a lot of the marketing, before I knew Syrax was Syrax. He was a yellow-clad ninja. I was like, oh, that's Scorpion, a new look for Scorpion. And of course, it wasn't. But that was part of the mystique of Mortal Kombat. You see these screenshots of unnamed characters, and you're like, who is this? Is it new?

Is it a new look for a turning character? I've always liked that about Mortal Kombat, that they shake things up. Yeah, even continuing into the sort of era when they, in all business sense, they probably shouldn't be doing that. But, like, Deadly Alliance is festooned with new characters, and that's really the game where they, I feel like they should have gone nostalgia. But I'm glad that they didn't. I'm glad they stuck with their guns, you know.

So, Lou Kang. made the cut. Lou Kang is still here, but he's now played by a new actor, a man named Eddie Wong, an actor stuntman. Coglalow was back, but Cuncalao was still Anthony Marquez. They didn't have a problem with Anthony Marquez. I guess he didn't, because he didn't sue. Sonia returns. However, Sonia, and this is a fun, I think this is an interesting story. Sonia is now played by Midway regular Carrie Hoskins, and I was already enough of a video game nerd to the point that I recognized Carrie Hoskins in this game. It's like, oh, that's the lady who is in, she was one of the cheerleaders in NBA Jam. And I think if I read even closer, I would have recognized

her as Helga, the evil last boss from Revolution X, the Aerosmith Shooting Game that used digitized actors. Uh, Carrie Hoskins was also a Playboy Playmate, so she was professional model. I don't think she was much of martial artists, but again, at this point, they know what they're doing. As long as you can throw a punch and, you know, pose like you're throwing a jump kick, they can make you look at you throwing a jump kick. So she did everything he had to do. So, yeah, in the past, John Tobias, just to look

for ways to throw his friend some more money, he would have them stick around set on Mortal Kombat 1 and 2 just to kind of help people, you know, who had to pose and, you know, keep them from falling and make sure they fell on mats. And Dan obviously was not around at this point, so I believe Carlos Pesina picked

up a lot of that slack for MK3. Even though Radin is not here. Correct. Raden was too busy helping the Earthwell warriors with martial arts. So there you go. Although, it's funny, they do actually have Raiden appear in the attract mode, but just like

as an overseer. He's like, I can't help you. Sorry. Because reasons. Yeah. Jacks is back as and John Parrish is back. He now has middle arms, and I positive that when we were younger, we

all assumed that because he tore people's arms off in Mortal Kombat 2, that Shang-sung turned into Jax and tore off Jax's arms, so now he had new metal arms. It's an incredibly convoluted explanation, but we all believe that was the truth. That was actually from John Parris saying, hey, all these other characters had these cool moves. I want something cool. And John Kras was like, we're giving you metal arms, and John Parrish was like, that'll work. He was on board with it.

I know it's late again, but the sound most things make is so satisfying when you hit someone with them. It is. It's so good. is this the game where he has the fatality where he havers you into the ground or is that later i can't remember that's not a fatality for him in this game i don't think shiva has that shiva has that yes oh i'm maybe thinking of shiva oh well they're very similar yes yes just a couple of arms extra you know so sub zero is back but sub zero has a brand new look along with his new actor who is uh as david mentioned before john turk he's a bodybuilder

He's into Taekwondo. He apparently is an ex-cop. He's not a ninja anymore. And going all the way back to the start of the podcast, he looks like a He-Man extra. I always felt because he's got these weird sort of like suspenders, but like his whole chess is out. And he's got a big scar on his face. I feel like he could easily be, you know, that's sort of a toy, which maybe they had in mind. I don't know. He's got some new moves. He can throw ice up into the air, which I feel like is pretty impractical. But more practical to the point that it basically breaks together. game, he can turn himself into an ice clone. And if you touch the clone, you freeze. And in early versions of the game, he could jump into you and freeze himself. And you couldn't block it, which means he could basically freeze you whenever he wanted to. And it just, it's completely off the rails. And they patched that out in later revisions. But if you play the early versions of the game, he's kind of indestructible if you know what you're doing. So, Wow. Whoops.

Richard DeVizio returns as Cano. So Cano has a new look, but he's still basically the same guy. He gets, he is a lot more mobile now. He can cannonball up at an angle. He's got a knife. He can swing this knife around. He looks, I think he looks a lot cooler, but his fatalities are a lot sillier. You know, he had a very visceral, simple, you know, Temple of Doom-style fatality in the original game where he tore your heart out.

now he can tear your skeleton out and your skin falls off like it's made of rubber, I guess, dramatic. So, in fairness, given that he, you know, has cardiovascular experience, obviously, and with his knives, maybe he's just a surgeon diamond, and you're giving him short shrift. He's just that good at excising skin from the skeleton. Oh, God, is this the I Am a Surgeon meme? are we doing that? Let's not doing that. I guess so. I guess so. Shang-sung is back. However, Shang-sung is also played by John Turk, which means he's younger and buffer than ever before. But I must say, whenever people talk to me about makeup and I

tell them that I want, you know, I want to get into more makeup and wear more makeup in my everyday life, Shang-sung is my platonic ideal. I want Shang-sung's makeup as seen in Mortal Kombat 3. I want these big, black diamonds on my face. And, you know, if, If possible, no pupils, but I don't know, I'm not a contact person, but that's the look. I want that look. I want the dark, evil, goth, I'm too busy. It's really cool. Yeah, that's the look I want.

It's a little bit like an evil Ultimate Warrior kind of thing, I reckon. I think so. Then again, the actual Ultimate Warrior was evil as well, wasn't he? Well, he was troubled. I think Troubled is the best term. And now he's dead. Unfortunately, yes. That was, you know, John Tobias.

told me that, you know, they thought Philip On did a great job in two, but he never really liked the look that he, Tobias, came up with for Shang Sung, and he really felt that they, they nailed the evil, like, dark sorcerer, necromancer type guy in Mortal Kombat 3. I love Shang Sun's look in this game. I love his hair. I wish I had that hair. God. Yeah. It's another point. In Mortal Kombat 2, he's just, he's wearing like a little, like a little Beanie. And instead, in Mortal Kombat 3, he's just got this luxurious, long, like, mid, like, down to his back ponytail. It's pretty outrageous.

But if we're talking about hair, we've got to talk about brand new character, Sindel. Sindel was played by Leah Montalongo, excuse me, who was just 19 during the filming, you know, another teenager. Not really a martial artist, a dancer, choreographer, fitness instructor. She was actually dating Brian Glenn, who played Shao Khan at the time. which is probably how she got recommended for this job. She has a gigantic wig on. Her hair is part of her attack. It's part of her weapons.

It's one of her fatalities. She also screams a lot. That's another fatality she does. She's got a very distinctive look. She can fly a little bit. Officially she's Kitana's mother, even though she's not that old, but she's like really, really old.

Again, Sindel, major lore character, but you wouldn't really know it at the time because she's just a brand new character. We don't really who this person is. I think that her fatality And if I'm wrong again I'm going to scream Where she scream

That wasn't genuine That was not intended I apologize When she screams so loud That all your skin comes off That's in the game And there's this disgusting frozen

Like dripping meat That to me is awesome I love that That's one of the few fatalities In this game That I really like It is over the top but it's also in character, I think.

It makes sense for them. And it's vile. It's really disgusting. It is. I feel like the vileness of that skeleton would have made me like Cano's skeleton rip fatality a lot more, but instead it's just completely clean.

Just make that gooey, sticky skeleton model, the skeleton model for the game. And I feel like it would have had, you know, Cano's fatality would have had a lot more impact. But yes, I'm with you, Sue. And that fatality of Sindel's awesome. The fact that they're still standing that makes it so good.

Like, yes. Another brand new character, Stryker. Stryker finally appears after being, you know, on the books, you know, on the early draft character from Mortal Kombat one, and then two, Stryker is finally here. He's a cop, and he's played by actor Michael O'Brien, and I've tried to look at Michael O'Brien. I found very little information about Michael O'Brien. I just don't know what he's up to or where he came from. I'm sorry, Michael O'Brien. But, Stryker, I feel like, even years before people talked about, you know, how much cops kind of in general suck and how we don't like cops.

This character, just as presented, just wasn't cool. He just, he seemed kind of goofy. Like, he's got a gun, but he only fires it into the air when he wins a match. You have no moves where he actually used, he doesn't have a fatality where he uses the gun. He would get one in a later revision. But in Vanilla MK3, it's just. just a prop, which is just to me very silly. And I just remember

making fun of him right from the get-go. I never liked him. I'm sorry. You know, Stryker fans, tell me I'm wrong, but I thought he was pretty lame. Stryker sucks in this game. He definitely doesn't play the role of a cop very well, because a cop would just draw their gun at the

drop of a hat and shoot everything. You'd think so. You'd think so. Stryker was a lot better, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, we can go into that later. But, yeah, I will definitely say, you know, Mortal Kombat 9, I think it was the first game to introduce, like,

taunts to the beginning of fights, and his taunt police brutality coming up has definitely not aged well at all. He was, there were rumors that John Cena was going to play him in 11. I don't know where that came from. That would have been something else. Yeah, yeah.

I got to be the guy who likes Stryker, because I've got a lineage of liking cop games like police quest and E-Swat. Like, cops suck. Cop games can be really fun. Agreed.

I do like Stryker because he's lame and I like the underdog. You know? A cop is an underdog. Who'd have thought it? I liked him in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 because of a very specific change that they made, but we can get in that. In the Mortal Kombat 3, Vanilla,

he didn't have a lot of ground to stand on. I don't know if this is MK3 or U.MK3, but I do like his fatality where he throws a grenade then he has this unique fingers and his ears like gritting his teeth turn around and hide it. It's very goofy, and that endears him to me, you know?

Yeah, he wires you up with explosives and then covers his ears. It's great. It's very funny. Like, it's a completely unique pose, and it's very funny. But yeah, his other fatality is just a taser, which again, hmm, you know, that's not so fantastic anymore.

He tases you for so long that you explode, which is also not particularly not really aged that well considering let's just agree that everything involving cops has aged poorly in all media speaking of age poorly here's night wolf uh night wolf is played by midway employee sal de vita who had been working i think since the nba jam days uh if you can guess by his name sal deita he is not a native at all he's just a white guy wearing native makeup so Yeah, I think the character obviously has a lot of lowerifications, and I think the character has some cool aspects to it, but it's also like, it's basically red face, you know, so not great. I mean, the entire foundation of the Mortal Kombat series is somewhat problematic. That's not to excuse it, obviously. But it's always kind of been there in a way. I've got to be honest, though, I think Nightwolf is cool, having all these like spectral like animals and things.

I think is a really cool concept for a character. It's just a shame that it couldn't have been, you know, authentic. Yeah, he's an absolute beast of a character to play. He's got some really fun juggles. You know, it's funny. You want to talk with coincidences. This is 1995. This is the same year that Star Trek Voyager debuted.

Star Trek Voyager famously had a native character on the bridge, but all their research and input came from a, you know, an expert who was not native. and just made up a bunch of shit. He was a liar. Like a professional liar? God's sake. I shouldn't laugh, but that is really funny. The actor was also not native,

but at least he, you know, the actor in the case of Voyager was a Mexican-American actor, so I feel like at least there's some equity there. But, yeah, Sal DeVita, not native, not Mexican. But you know, it's not native or Mexican, but more mysterious

is Cabal. Caval, in fact, Richard DeVizio pulling double duty here, but now this time, instead of wearing a rubber mask or a half mask, he's wearing a full face mask. You can't see anything. It's a little bit like a gas mask, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Cabal's cool as shit.

Yes, he is. Yes, he is. He's a little bit too cool because they gave him too many moves. And in the original Mortal Kombat 3, if you know what you're doing, you can do like a 50% combo, it's pretty absurd. He's a very unusual visual design character. I don't, I mean, who's a law reason for it? But, like, what is his deal?

Like, what is he? Is he red black dragon, isn't it called? I forget. The thing that Kano's part of. Yeah, he was like a, I think a Black Dragon member, like, and then he was attacked by Shao Khan's Extermination Squad, which is why he needs the respirator. Yeah. So I think in some stories, like, he turns into a hero character, but, uh, you know,

Yeah, that's the lower reason for the respirator. Which you can use in fatality to inflate your head and you pop like a balloon. Yeah. Which is somehow his least silly fatality. Yeah. This game is full of daft crap, though, as we've said. It's just, we don't get to it, but the fatality which destroys the entire planet, you know. I mean, it's fun, but it does kind of hurt the game.

I would say. It does destroy the sense of like very similar shoot that the previous game had. I know I'm sort of repeating the same point, so I'll get off the subject now. But as we go through the characters and we're remembering these silly, silly changes, these weird sprites that they added in that just don't quite work. Yeah, sorry, we'll get to them, obviously. But Kabbal's definitely one with an unfortunate fatality set. I would argue that as far as weird sprites,

Let's go, Shiva works because Shiva is essentially a female goro. So she's not an actor. She is, you know, a model, a stop motion creation. And I think she works because she is really weird. She also sounds really weird. I don't know who's, I guess, I think, David, you once did that Edmund did all the voices. I don't know if that's still the case here, but her voice sounds especially inhuman,

which I think works because it makes her seem even more alien. she's kind of in my experience of playing this game she's kind of a noob filter because she has a move that just literally does press down then up

and if you don't know how to avoid it you can just stomp people consistently with it because it's actually quite hard to avoid if you don't know how so she's a bit of a filter in that respect but once my friends

figured out how to dodge that that was it I was doomed but she's being a Shokan is this the first time in the series you've been other players is a Shokan? Am I imagining that? I don't know if Goro is playable in the console ports or anything. No, this is the

first time. Oh, wait, Kintori Morph, I guess that counts, but yeah. Yeah, just for a fatality, so you're not really playing. So you're still right, you're still right. Okay. Yeah, and Shiva, unfortunately, bottom of the tier list in the MK3 games. Well, except for trilogy, which we'll talk about later.

Yeah. Unless you're me. Yeah, unless you're with the unbreakable, unblockable teleports. And Stu, since you mentioned it earlier, she also has a fatality where she tears off your skin and that skeleton just stands there. Dripping.

She also has that one. The pyramid head from the Son Hill movie. However, I think in the original game, if you're playing Shiva and you tear off Shiva's skeleton, there's only two arms because they didn't make more than one sprite. That is correct. So let's talk about the robots. They decided not to bring back any ninjas.

in the Mortal Kombat 3, because they've decided to go with cyborg ninjas. And I feel like, on paper, that is just the right amount of stupid. But I think in execution, they made the costume too stupid. I don't know. I don't know. I feel like... The law here is like Sub-Zero's clan, like the Lin-Qua in the future or something, decide that for some reason all the Lin-Qua have got to become...

robot ninjas now. Yes. As part of their, like, progress. Yes. Because I know they get heavily into it in Mortal Kombat 9, which is just essentially a reboot of these games. I mean, these characters are like deep law characters, basically. There's a lot going on with these chaps.

And they are really stupid. Like, oh, they're so crushingly dumb. I mean, they do look kind of cool, but they're also ridiculous. Like, they've got the stupidest fatalities, like the self-destraughts. and releasing a million little bombs that destroys the entire planet

and that one where it's like they put you in this weird crusher that comes out of your chest. I kind of like that one. It might be the least... It's the least stupid because overall I agree. I do think I kind of like their look

but they, you know, they leaned a little... Yeah. You know, it's always funny to learn that like even a game as big as Mortal Kombat didn't have a huge budget, right? Like they were still kind of rounding up costumes like used costumes from costume shops. and stuff. But these characters have, like Syrax and Smoke especially are really, really fun

to play. Smoke is, once you unlock him, he's basically Scorpion. He has a different teleport punch where he comes up from the bottom, like Sector, but he has Scorpion Spear, and he has some really great dial-a combos. He's really, really fun to play. Yeah, I definitely, the other reason I unlock smoke on every cabin I could is because I always wanted to play Smoke because he was the closest scorpion as you had. But they all had, I mean, they all have their own sort of, I think they are interesting characters to play. I just feel like they look sillier than they needed to be.

I think they, like, you know, as you said, maybe they didn't have the costume budget or just didn't photograph right. I don't know. I always felt they looked like a predator wearing motocross gear because they have like dreads. It's just, I think it was for strange. I can see that. I can see that. There are three robots in Vanilla Mortal Kombat 3, and they are called Syrax, who's

yellow, there's sector, who's red. and there's smoke who's gray, and he smokes. But they're all played by Sal DeVita wearing this sort of costume, which I don't think works as robots go. Also, the robots bleed black, I guess, because it's like oil. I don't know. It's a weird choice.

But rounding out the cast, Noobsovite returns as a hidden character again. However, since there's no ninjas anymore, it's now Shadow Cano, so it's basically Divisio, all black. Which I always thought was an odd choice because they could have just used the unmasked sub-zero palette.

Like, he's all black, so you couldn't tell that he's not wearing a ninja costume anyway. But, yeah, there's just a lot of weird choices with Mortal Kombat 3, and this to me is one of them. I feel about noob-sidebots look in this iteration of MK3, as you do with the robot's appearance, I think. Well, they'd undo it a few months later. Yes. So for bosses, however, they made a slight change after two games of what if you fought Giant with four arms, they said, what if you fight a giant centaur? So he's got four legs.

Oh, my God, this guy. Yeah, this guy. Massive, but it's a massive centaur, and I feel like the internet has caught up with this. I think the internet's way more to centaur is now than they were in 1985, but he's a beast. He automatically reflects projectiles, which I feel is completely bonkers. I can't believe you would make a character that just automatically reflects projectiles. That's insane. I, I, if I, if by some miracle I can get to Mataro, that's it, my game's done.

Like, I can't get past Mataro. He is the worst. It's ridiculously hard, ludicrous. And the thing that I find about Mataro is, compared to Goro and Cantaro, who doesn't even look cool. I mean, it is the novelty of him, of being a centaur, but outside of that, it's just almost just like a Hell Knight from Doom, the top part of the Hell Knight from Doom, stuck on the back of a horse, isn't it? He makes Doom noises for sure. He definitely sounds like a demon monster. He does.

He does. There is a change to the mechanics in Ultimate MK3 that actually trivializes him, but we can talk about that in a bit. And his last boss, Shaulkan returns as the last boss, still played same actor, still voiced by same actor. The only thing really new about Shao Khan is that he has a hammer, and I think he says more things during the game that he didn't say in the last game. I also think he might, I think it's new in this game that he could actually point it, you in the ground and taunt you. I think that's new for his MK3. This is weird to me because

he invaded Earth Realm so fast that I guess he didn't have time to build a house or an arena. So you just fight him in the pit three. He's like, yeah, this is temporary. I haven't moved into my house yet. So you just fight him in the pit three. And I don't think he can knock you in. Is there even for him to knock him

to the pit? I don't think there is. No. No way. He like in all the bosses in the arcade games, with the exception of Shinok and MK4, they don't have fatalities and you cannot perform fatalities of any kind on them. They just read your moves and kill you, basically. Yeah.

So we do have fatalities are back, of course fatalities are back, of course friendships are back. As we've alluded to, though, a lot of the fatalities this time around just seem silly or stupid or just confusing. Like I looked at Jax. I think Jax is like the perfect in encapsulation of this. Like in Mortal Kombat 2, Jacks had two of the best fatalities. They were so gutterol, they were so simple. I'm going to crush your head, or I'm going to tear your arms off. And in both cases, you're going to hate them. You're going to hate this feeling when I do this to you. And in Mortal Kombat 3, his two fatalities are he turns his arms into knives

and chops you up into very bespoke pieces, like very distinct little pieces. Yeah, like Barakas you, basically. Yeah, but it looks silly because your body. part falls into very distinct parts instead of like slime or like gross stuff. It's just like, you know what I mean? Yeah. It's just like they've just cropped them in as paint basically.

Exactly. Well, and when you look at those parts, the arms are just kind of hanging in midair. Exactly, exactly. It's very, it's very cheaply done. And his other fatality is he turns into a giant and steps on you.

Okay. What? This this is this might be tied for me with smokes like Armageddon fatality like I can buy the knife chop fatality because like he also fires missiles from his arms so you're like okay the arms can do things I don't know all the things they can do but they are malleable but like Jacks is a giant like it just most a lot of the fatalities have always been not always but in most cases they are extension of the character you know Baraka impales you on his knife Scorpion is undead and breathes fire. Jack's using his knives is fine. I think the part people would hate about that is the evenly sized pieces, which just looks silly. But a giant, Jacks is a giant? Is that like, was that an upgrade that they threw in with the arms?

Like, hey, you paid a lot for this. You get giant abilities for free? Like, I don't know where that came from. I hate it. It's just very, very strange. Likewise, Luke Kang is one where he disappears and a Mortal Kombat One cabinet crushes you, and then he reappeared. The fourth wall, I barely knew her.

I don't know where that one is from either. I don't have any issue with the fatalities, no inherent issue with them being silly. But the fact that the game itself looks more, it looks more realistic. It has a earthier kind of down-to-earth look to it, I think. It's very jarring, and it makes them look garish and kind of trashy, and, like, they don't really fit.

I mean, stuff like reptiles' head growing vast every time he takes a bite of your body, which he also does in the bespoke, like, segments. I mean, he has the other, there are some good ones, like the acid spit fatality that reptile does, I think, is really well done. But mostly, they're all just so big and goofy, and it's almost just kind of like a case of just because you can do this,

doesn't mean you should. you know yeah i'm i'm pretty hard on on the fatalities of this game and i do think there's definitely they they are charring when you when you look at the the grittier art style for sure but i also feel like they leaned into certain aspects of them so that you became desensitized like again so many fatalities cause you to explode often inexplicably like johnny cage in trilogy he like breaks your spine over his knee and that is so painful that you just erupt and there are multiple skulls and ribcages and like four arms and six legs and it's just it it doesn't make any sense and I feel like I don't know a lot of the fatalities I'm okay

with the silliness too because Boone and Tobias have always had a sense of humor but a lot of them just feel kind of phoned in compared to the more creative fatalities in Mortal Kombat too especially yeah yeah and also the fact that the there were a lot of explosions in Mortal Kombat 2, but there would be like a pile of bones and would look like guts in the ground, whereas Mortal Kombat 3, what you get looked like mannequin parts? Like, they look exceptionally false. Yeah, they're just kind of generic, right? Yeah.

Like, plasticy arm, plasticy leg, which is especially weird when you consider, I guess the cyborgs having blood and body parts is okay because cyborgs are, you know, partly human. But like, with Shiva and just other characters, it just really sticks. out. Those discrepancies really stick out. And we also have to mention the fact that beyond regular fatalities, they've created a brand new kind of fatality, which is an

animality, and it's so needlessly complicated. You have to be in round three. You have to perform a special new concept called a mercy, where you beat your opponent, you go to the opposite end of the screen, and you give

them back a little bit of life. Now, how do you do that again? You hold... And you have to kill them again. You hold block and do something, right? To do a mercy, I'm trying to get to the actual command. You hold run and tap down three times, and I think you have to be like sweep distance. One of those really specific mortal combat things. Yeah.

But you have to be far enough away that you can't just, like, hit them right away. So you've given them a chance, essentially. You give them another bit of life. You get a chance. But then you kill them again, and then you can do the animality. And I feel like, you know, two years later, the morphing fad isn't quite as hot. The morphs in this game look especially shitty. Like, you morph into a monster, like an animal, but it's like neon-colored.

Like, it doesn't look cool at all. Like, Luke Kang's dragon morph in MK2 was astonishing. You're like, whoa, look at that. And it had a great sound, and it was a surprise. And in this game, everyone has an animality, and almost all of them play out exactly the same. You turn into some weird Photoshop character. you crawl onto your opponent, they scream, and

blood flies into the air and just like, oh no, it's eating you. Oh, no. Yeah, it's, this is a weird thing. I don't like the fatalities. Like, I applaud Boone and Tobias

for, you know, kind of polling the community, finding out that animalities, which were rumored in Mortal Kombat 2 were a thing, and they're like, okay, let's make those. And they're sufficiently hidden, but they're just not worth, the effort. And I, again, it has to do with the extensions of characterization to me. Like,

okay, sub-zero, if he's going to turn into a really weird, like, sticker-looking single-color animal, a polar bear. That makes sense. Shang-sung, snake makes sense. He has kind of a snake-like pose in the versus screen and in the game. But the rest, it's like, I don't know, some of them like turn into wasps and there's, you know, scorpion doesn't even turn into a scorpion. It's weird. It's bizarre. I think cabals, another character has the scorpion. So scorpion can't. It's absolutely absurd.

It's ridiculous. The most wide open goal there, when he completely missed. So at the time, I would say, you know, I was still way in Immortal Combat when World Cup of 3 came out. I put a lot of coins in this game, and I definitely bought the home version when it came out in the fall, which was a very quick turnaround, obviously, by design. But I definitely was disappointed at the time. I was like, this isn't, you know, after Mortal Kombat 2 blew me away compared to one,

three was kind of like, oh, you didn't have as many good ideas this time around, did you? It just felt like, I don't know, it was like a C minus. Like, I liked the dial of combos. I liked some of the new systems, but they really didn't come into their own until Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. But in terms of like the fatalities, this was also a point when like the, the breadth of life given to arcades, largely by Street Fighter 2, but then also Mortal Kombat a year or so later, it was like kind of starting to fade, 3D fighting games were really picking up. So there was a point that, like, people were kind of over the novelty of the digitized

actors, and they were playing games like, you know, Tekken and Virtual Fighter and stuff. There was, it's also just, it's the third one of those, you know? It was just, there was some franchise fatigue setting in. Right. The idea of a video game containing violence just is not nearly as shocking as it was, you know, three years earlier. And there, you know, there's a visceral quality to the fatalities of Mortal Kombat 1 and 2. Where it's like, I don't know that a lot of parents were super upset about smoke blowing up the world. They were probably like, what is this ridiculousness?

It's very looney to them. Yeah. So we've teased it, let's talk about it. Let's talk about Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, which arrived in arcades in November of 19965. As you said earlier, David, it exists because the home versions came out so quickly. They wanted to make sure arcade operators were getting their money's worth. So they came with this idea, like, well, what if we, you know, this is basically, I would say that it's like their version of, you know, champion edition or Super Street Fighter 2 in that it's the same game. But we've added a few new characters.

We've remixed a few things. We've edited a few things. And it's just, it's a bigger, bolder version of what was already out there. And one of the big changes is the fact that they went back and they filmed, more actors, and they brought back the ninjas. So, John Turk is now a ninja. He plays Scorpion. He plays Reptile.

He plays a new character called Ermach. He's a red ninja. And he plays classic sub-zero because one sub-zero wasn't enough. I don't know the thinking of that process, but there's basically four ninjas now. They also have newcomer Becky, Becky, I said Becky Grable. Becky Gable, a model dancer, and she is Katana, she's Molina, she is Jade. Again, I think a poor move, which I think they fix in later games, Jade is essentially Becky Gable colored to be black, and I think they would hire a black actor later, but

I don't know that Jade looked necessarily African American in Moral Kombat 2, but in three, she definitely looks like a black woman, but she's not black. Becky Gable is just not black, so I think that was a mistake. Well, it is sort of blackface. Yeah, it's like digitally colored. Yeah. Yeah. There is sort of a relic, there is a difference in a sense, but the ultimate result is not great.

I mean, of course, they have, you know, fixed it now, so. But still, that's a lot of, even though it is essentially two actors being repeated, that is a significant increase of number of overall characters. I know I definitely appreciated New Scorpion. I thought the, I thought the combos were fun. I thought his new fatality was fun, where he'd be. someone's a bunch of other scorpions from hell. I thought that was cute. Yeah. I like that one

a lot. Ludicrous. Absolutely ludicrous, but it's great. They added some new stages. They rebalance some characters. I guess certainly Striker changed a lot because they let striker use his gun. So here's the Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.

I was pretty hard on Vannell MK3, but I love Ultimate MK3, and we're about to get into why. This is really the blueprint for all Mortal Kombat games, all successful Mortal Kombat games that followed. Everything they did here just really hit. The roster was great, and the mechanics were great, made so by the biggest edition, which was the Linker punch. So in Mortal Kombat 3, the hard thing about the dial-a-comboes was like you had to get

next to an opponent on the ground and hope that they held still along enough for you to do it or didn't block, which is why it kind of behoved people to play characters like Sub-Zero or Cyber Smoke who had a stun move. In this, any character can do a flying punch, high punch or low punch, and immediately transition into a dial a combo. It opened up a lot more setup. It opened up some wild juggle combos, and it was just hugely influential. There was also another move. I think every character, almost every character has one called a launcher, where from the ground, you can pop them into the air and then go into a juggle combo from there. Like Night Wolf has one where he pops you up.

up with his hatchet at the end of a dial combo and then you can hit them with the hatchet like three or four more times continuing to juggle them and then do his like shadow uh shoulder slam which i can only imagine he somehow stole from johnny cage and it's just like devastating amount of damage uh also smoke could turn into human smoke in this game and he was actually a a better i'm jumping ahead a bit but it was funny because uh he was actually a better scorpion than scorpion because he had a launcher where I don't think Scorpion did. He's top tier in this game along with Cabal. Human Smoke specifically.

Yes, human smoke is there as a second hidden character. And also, Noob Saibot is in the game again, but he's now a ninja again. But he's all black. So it's basically John Turk again. Right. They brought back endurance matches, which I thought was a nice touch. They were not present in MK2, but they were back in MK3. one of the very strangest ideas though

I guess again in a pre-internet world you want this but when you beat the game in Ultimate World Combat 3 you get this giant row of boxes and it says

pick your reward and each box does something different and one box is just like here's your ending it's all text whereas other ones are like fight a hidden character

fight two hidden characters and one of the boxes is like what if you just want to watch some fatalities like of course at that time that was the only way actually just watch fatalities. There was no YouTube, of course. But in hindsight, it is

kind of wild to think, like, that's just an option you can just do and just, you win the game, and then just sit there, you know, for about six, seven minutes, watching it throw all these animations at you. Which also included Babelities, and that got really annoying after about three or four of those. You know what got really annoying is hearing the noise, da-da-dun. Over and over again. Stu, you mentioned this earlier. Like, my friends, any of you, time. They'd have me beat the arcade version since I was the best MK player. And they're like

ultimate demonstration. And this is before YouTube. So like we just watch this like 20 minute long thing and it was just endlessly entertaining. Also I should add that, you know, in running on these characters, three of the characters I mentioned earlier were actually locked. So instead of the single combat code that unlocked smoke, you had a choice of three different characters you could unlock with three different combat codes in this game. But all of them were very long, very complicated, and you really had to, again, you had very little time. And I think you'd only do one at a time, too, so you couldn't just, like, do one coin and do them all. Like, you really had to plan these out.

You probably needed help, too. So this is another case of once they were unlocked there permanently, or say permanently, in the ROM, so to speak. Yes. Cool, cool. I did not know that. That's really cool. I know that other fighting games would use things like timed release of characters like Tekken did that, I think. Yes.

where every week or so another character would unlock but Mortal Kombat no So the Ultimate So at the same time at the same time as the home version's arrived and I think Ultimate MK3 did get certain home ports, but really, am I wrong on that, David? I think there were home ports of Ultimate, weren't they not?

There were, yeah, it's definitely on the Mega Drive and the SNAS. I bought the Mega Drive cartridge earlier this week, actually. Oh, okay. To see what it was like. Yeah, and they're definitely exists. They're really kind of cool because they're kind of, the Mega Drive and SNS version specifically kind of straddle the line between Ultimate MK3 and Trilogy.

Like, they include Noob, Cybot, and Rain, which didn't become, neither of those became playable until trilogy. They included brutalities, which is actually a common mistake people make. A lot of people believe trilogy introduced them, but the home versions of UMK3, I believe, were out. I believe they were out first. Oh. Well, I mean, the MK3 itself, just vanilla MK3 had a PlayStation and Saturn, I want to say, but not ultimate for some reason. Yeah. So, like, Ultimate was on, Ultimate was on Saturn, but not PS3. MK3 was on PC, DOS, and Windows versions, but never Ultimate.

So it really did skip around until Trilogy was kind of on everything, but there were huge differences in how they played. You get into that. But, yeah, that's what I was getting to. So after a bit of different platforms have different ports now, they decide, they went with, starting in 1996, some versions came out in 97, they created a game called Mortal Kombat Trilogy, which at the time, this is a pre-Mugan world, it's basically, it's like, here's all the characters we can possibly fit into one ROM.

This is that version of Dream merch, I guess. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And also, Michelle also add that Mortal Kombat Trilogy is a home exclusive. There was no arcade version. It came out on home consoles. I believe Nintendo 64 was the first. first version, but it came out to almost every home console and DOS.

Yeah, it was Saturn, PlayStation, and DOS, as you say, as well as N664. I think also the Tiger Gamecom had a version of this as well. The definitive version. But yeah, Mortal Comic Trilogy is just this sort of absurd amount of characters, and I don't think they really were particularly careful about balance or anything like that, that It's like, here, here's everybody we could possibly get in here. Rain graduates from fake character to real character. It's a purple ninja.

Get it. It's purple rain. Noobse-Bot, playable. Johnny Cage. When you're the first time I've ever got that, thank you. I'm not joking. I didn't get that. That's great.

Thank you. You're welcome. I didn't know that until recently. Like in research, I'm like, oh, I get it. Wow. Wow. Yeah. Johnny Cage is back.

Recast by as model athlete Chris Alexander. Reiden comes back, and technically, Raiden is still Carlos Posina, but they got Richard DeVizio to play him on the versus screen. I don't know why that is, but Raiden's back. And depending on which version you own, there are playable bosses, but not all the bosses. It varies, depending on what you have. Also, Shang-Sung can only turn into some of the bosses, maybe not all the bosses. but of course if you're playing on like a PlayStation or a Saturn he can only morph in a certain characters because they simply can't load all the characters at once

so you have to like choose which characters you want to be so mathematically you probably want to pick a ninja because if you pick one ninja you can be all the ninjas I think it's just a matter of spright work as I mentioned earlier if you do do the morphs you're going to be despised by the second player because of the disc accessing you're going to make them sit through

but there was in the options menu you could you could choose like which characters to enable and which to disable. So that helped a little. Yeah, there was quite a lot of customization. There was also Seeker Options menu as well, wasn't there? Like a couple, I think. Yeah, there's a lot of customization there.

It's very cool. This is why I've asked for the N64 version because it was a big cartridge. And even though that meant it couldn't fit every character on there, I think Goro and Gatoro are missing. It is a cartridge. So if you play Sheng Sung, he can morph instantly. He can morph into almost everybody.

You don't have to worry about any of that stuff. No, I'm not sure, it might be noted here, and I'm missing it, but just to be really awkward, they had an exclusive character for each version, right? Like, the N64 version had Chameleon with a K, which is the female chameleon, I want to say? That's correct. So they took after, I want to say, milan, chameleon and katana. And shade, yeah. And, yeah, and Jets, excuse me, sorry. And the PS one of the Saturn-DOTS versions, I want to say, had chameleon with a C, who took off.

to I want to say the ninjas. Yes. And it was kind of warping colors. So this is just a trivia note, really, but when Mortal Kombat Armageddon came around and claimed to have every character, no! It missed one of the chameleons,

and I'm going to die mad about it. But as David mentioned earlier, the brutalities may have appeared in home ports of UMK3 first, but basically brutality is essentially a very long, combo that lets you make your, it makes your opponent explode, but you have to learn a lot of moves. So it's really, it's really intensive. Absolutely so, I would say.

So once your aggressor meter is full, you can just pull off this move. That's what it's for. So Brutales are actually finishers. They were inspired, I believe, by, by Killer Instincts Ultra combos, which is the same deal. Probably. Probably. Although they had to, with those, you had to start them with your opponent's life was like in the flashing danger zone. But in Mortal Kombat, you wait for the finish him or her and then you punch in this yes, Diamond, this absurdly long combo that I would try once and then never bothered to memorize, because it's just the same thing for every character. Everybody just explodes with an uppercut at the end. Yeah, the aggressor. Not a fan. The aggressor meter is kind

of like, well, I mean, it's a meter, but there's no super moves or anything. It just, it's something that fills up as you play, as you attack. And I think it goes up even faster if they're blocking. So it's just, it's just a way to get you to move, you know, be more aggressive, literally. But once it's full, it just makes you faster. Like, there's no, there's no actual, like, unlocks or anything. You don't get to do, like, a supermoor. I believe it was done partially in response to turtling, because in Mortal Kombat games, I think since the first one, or if not at least MK2, or like, if you held down and back and block, you couldn't be thrown anything. And so aggressor basically rewarded, like, if you pulled off combos on a block,

opponent, your aggressor bar would fill up even faster. Like, it really rewarded offense and aggression. I agree. So it's well-named. And at this point, I believe trilogy is available on GOG.com. So if you want to have a huge Moral Combat Love Fest,

I guess, in 2D, this is probably the easiest way to do it. I think that also the version that they're selling is prepackaged with a sort of a launcher that might be a fan-made thing, because I know that I had no trouble getting it working. and there was definitely some kind of stuff there

that I'm pretty sure it isn't normally there. So it's a very, very good version of the game. They put a lot of love into that. But obviously, at this point, you know, this came out in 96, 97 in some places. I think one version maybe even was 98. But obviously at this point, they're well on their way to making Mortal Kombat 4,

which is, of course, it's going to be a 3D game. So this is kind of like their farewell to 2D sprites and their farewell to digitize actors as we know it. So it really is sort of at the end. of an era in a way. There were obviously ports following this. I've got to, I mean, Mortal Kombat Advance, which is a piece of trash, don't even think about playing it.

And there's Mortal Kombat, Ultimate Mortal Kombat on the DS, which is actually rather good. It's great, yeah. I'd recommend that one. I'm pretty sure that's the one, that one has like move lists on the bottom screen and stuff. It's really good. Another development note here, part of Midway's, uh, Williams, a very aggressive plan in 1995 was they were kind of looking at the sales of acclaims home ports, which were selling in the

millions, whereas they were moving tens of thousands of arcade units at Midway. And they said, why are we giving other people a slice of the pie? So they acquired Trade West. They turned them into Williams Entertainment and basically devoted, like the first project internally, I believe, was the home ports of Mortal Kombat 3. So Ed Boone and John Tobias were actually like sending code and and sprites and backgrounds and all that stuff and the home and arcade version of mk3 were in development in parallel so that takes us that takes us to trilogy which was actually made by williams with some support by boon and tobias who were working on mk4 and mk mythologies respectively at the time oh god i can't wait for the mk mythologies episode that does explain

a lot of the timeline then that makes a lot of sense yeah and the trilogy kind of started what I think you could consider a trend, where at the end of an era, in this case, the 2D Sprite-based era, they kind of had a, the gangs all here, brew ha ha, with every character, which I always thought was kind of funny, because for a series predicated on over-the-top violence and death moves, no one had died, which is always kind of funny to me. But Armageddon was sort of the same thing, with the absence of one chameleon, as do pointed out, for the 3D era. So a lot of people are wondering going into Mortal Kombat 12, like, could this be the end of the modern era? Are we going to see another, like, greatest hits sort of album, or it will

be more traditional Mortal Kombat with some instances and some new phases? Well, as it's recording listeners, we don't know. What do we know? Well, we know that we've been talking for almost three hours now, and I'm getting a little loopy. So perhaps we should wrap things up. And I don't know. I guess there's really no controversy here.

I think we can all agree that of these games, MK2 is best? You know what? There actually is. I wouldn't call it controversy, but there's some divisiveness. Okay. In the pro scene, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 is considered the definitive version. Over trilogy, because trilogy is kind of broken and imbalanced in some ways. I mean, Rain, Noob, Seibot, and the bosses are broken.

They're banned from tournament play. Also, you know, the versions of trilogy are different. A lot of people prefer the N64 version because since they had to cut sprites and frames, some characters that were previously weak, like Sheba, is at the top of the mountain. She can juggle you with her crouching kick, which people call the top. toe tickler. That's an infinite it's an infinite combo in the corner. She just kind of has this

really dainty like up motion kick where she just hits you with her two toes and juggles you to death. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, everyone could play it. It was in arcades. It was everywhere. And you know, between basic attacks, special moves, dial combos, jugglers and launchers, like

that's kind of why I said that that game specifically is the blueprint for the series. Like it was unbalanced in some ways, but nowhere near as gross as trilogy. So I think from the competitive side, like Ultimate MK3 is still played today, but Mortal Combat 2 definitely is

like probably the most popular classic version overall because it's where it's almost like Street Fighter 2 where a lot of people started, like that was their entry point into the series. It was that big in popular culture. I mean, of course, I mean, it helps obviously that

it was the one that had, you know, relative parity between the home ports as well. Well, it was It was just this perfect storm, right? Because, like, it was vastly improved. The parity between the home ports was great. This is also at the pinnacle of the arcade resurgence. Like, right before things started to kind of drop off,

and home consoles became very, very close to arcade hardware. Like, Mortal Kombat 2 just did everything right. Even the tone and the aesthetic as well. Like, a lot of that stuff in 3 is questionable. Mortal Kombat 2, tone-wise, is damn near perfect. You know, it's funny. You mentioned the music there. because Mortal Kombat 3 came home during the disc era,

I know that when I got my copy, it was, you know, it's just on a CD. So I thought it was, I was a static that I got essentially with my game, a free soundtrack CD, because if you put it in a CD player, you can just listen to the Mortal Kombat 3 soundtrack, which I must say, for, you know, for all the changes that they made that I think were shaky, I think the music of MK3 is generally pretty good. And especially the subway, I think the subway is actually, Excellent. I love the subway music for MK3.

Same. It's great. I think I might be 100% wrong on this, so feel free to edit this out. But I think that Mortal Kombat 2 actually got a late port to the PS1 as well, the PlayStation. I'm almost certain there's a PS1 version of that game. If I'm wrong, then I'm wrong. But it's interesting that that was out on PlayStation, because it feels like it predates that by quite some time. But, yeah, it's there. So weird. It's possible.

I mean, I know, I'm sure at the time I would have looked at that and said, oh, but I have MK3 now. I don't need MK2, but... That's what makes it so what? I'm almost certain it exists, and I'm going to have to check, because if I'm wrong, this is very embarrassing. Mortal Kombat 2's home versions were pretty weird. Yeah, it does exist.

It does exist. Yeah, I think it was, it might not have been, like, in the West. I think it might have, like, it came out in Japan. But, yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff around Mortal Kombat 2's home versions. So, any final words on the topic of... 2D Moral Combats that we've discussed today, we discussed a lot of them. I think we've said every word that could conceivably be set about these games. This has been very exhaustive and it's been lots of fun as well.

Yes. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. Like I think that as hard as people, even diehard fans were on, I mean, there are people who approached Vanilla MK3, took one look at the select screen, said, no scorpion, and then just walked away. But ultimate MK3 is really a great game. I prefer to, but I think gameplay-wise three is where everything came together and kind of, that's where the series

found itself, and then trilogy is just a great party game. It's a lot of fun. I mean, I guess I'd want to mention the fact that they're teasing Immortal Combat 12 now, so we're heading into the future soon. Hopefully, knowing the retronauts curse, by the time this goes

out, they'll have aired a full trailer for it or something. But I'm really looking forward to that. I think it's one of the series that has managed to overcome a hump period or at least two hump periods and had come back blazing, to be honest. And that's quite impressive. And commercially, it is the best-selling franchise in the world. It left Street Fighter behind a long time ago, which is saying something because you know, Mortal Kombat, even until I would say the modern era with MK9 and 2011 wasn't

taken seriously by a lot of pro players, but it is definitely number one with a bullet now. So I'm always interested to see what each new Mortal Kombat game has in store. Yes, who knows what is store for this franchise in between us recording today and when it goes live. We could all look like fools, but let us be the fools who had fun, talk about Moral Combat for hours on end. I certainly had fun tonight. I had fun revisiting these games, making the notes. I had fun revisiting these games watching videos to just remind myself which character was in which game, because, you know, it's been a long time. I had to confirm this.

I had fun tonight. Thank you so much for joining me, everybody. Stuart, why don't you go first and tell the people where they can find you on the internet? Yeah, you can find me on Twitter at Stupacabra, wittering on constantly. And also, I've got a book coming out called All Games Are Good that's going to be out of the end of June, I believe, through Press Run. And it's about how all games are good, even when they're bad. So, yeah, a huge collection of silly writings that I've done. and also serious writings that I've done about video games. I really hope people are going to enjoy it.

Thank you. You can find me at David O'Craddock on Twitter, david O'Cradoc.com on the interwebs, and check out Long-Lidmorel combat. And Sue, that book sounds fantastic. I cannot wait to check that up. Thank you. I've read many of your books, I have to say.

I'm not going to lie, a lot of them came through a story bundle, but I have read lots and lots of them. Well, that's awesome. I appreciate that. Thank you. Like it. Stake-a-d-d-d-d-wrease. Meanwhile, this has been Retronauts,

and we appreciate everyone who listens to Retronauts, but we especially appreciate the fact that some of you donate your hard-earned dollars to keep this podcast on the air. So, yes, if you go to patreon.com slash Retronauts, you can, for three dollars a month, listen to all our episodes one week early and at higher-quality audio format.

However, if you go a little further, If you do $5 a month, guess what? You get the early episodes. You get exclusive episodes two every month. You get exclusive weekly columns from me. I also read them, which means they're exclusive weekly podcasts. We have an exclusive monthly community podcast, usually featuring me, sometimes do, maybe other retronauts. Who can say?

We also have Discord. The Discord is also exclusive to the $5 level. So for a small pittance each month, you can get a little. a lot more retronauts. But even if you'll listen for free, we are glad you're here. Thank you so much. In the meantime, me personally, Diamond Fight, you can find me around the internet if you look up Fight Club, F-E-I-T, that is my last name, C-L-U-B. That is a weapon that you might beat someone to death with like a Mortal Kombat character, but perhaps in Mortal Kombat 4, which we'll talk about in the future. But for now, this has been a 2D retrospective of Mortal Kombat.

Thank you so much. Finish me? Okay, I'll go on a plane And I'll go on a plane Oh, ah. Wow. That was an epic.