Why did they add so many ninjas in MK series? Sub Zero and

>>3965715
>Ermac
Fun Fact: That name originated from an error message in the arcade diagnostics screen.

>>3965719
Specifically, "error macro"

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does he count also

>>3965715
easy character to make

for some reason the public sucked it up

I'm amazed they made new characters who weren't palette swap ninjas

>Scorpion
>Sub-Zero
>Reptile
>Smoke
>Ermac
>Noob Saibot

And if you're willing to count them since they're cyborg ninjas:
>Cyber Sub-zero
>Sektor
>Cyrax

Not to mention the "female ninjas":
>Kitana
>Mileena
>Jade

There's no such thing as "too much ninjas"

>90s
>ninjas
Bread, butter.

>>3965715
Mortal Kombat used digitized graphics. So it when making a new character it wasn't just telling your art department to draw some new sprites. They had to hire an actor, make a physical costume and then film them doing all the shit they wanted.

In the end it was far, far easier to hire one actor, film them doing a bunch of crap and then just change the colours to make one guy into 10 different characters.

Pretty simple really.


Classic vs modern Sub Zero is because Sub was one of the most popular characters and his regular version in 3 wasn't popular with a lot of 1 and 2 Sub players so they put the old version of him in.

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>>3965715
>be me
>get into MK during MK1 arcade phase
>so awesome!
>haha hidden ninja with both powers!
>MK2
>Hah Reptile is playable, that's kinda neat.
>hah more hidden ninjas
>they become playable in the sequel/s
>special soul specter with prince water powers and he's also the brother of this other character twice removed and turned into a robot but then went back to human
>Now wait a minute Boon..

inb4 explanation about how character was a joke character in console etc etc kys

>>3966502
You weren't playing MK for story... were you? More ninjas = more characters. More characters = more match ups = more fun.

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>>3965715
It don't matter, none of that matter.

Now post dem blue characters

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>>3966703

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>>3966707
Good, good.

Now post dem yellow characters

>>3965719
Alucard is Dracula backwards

>>3965715
All of them outside the main three (Sub, Scorp, Reptile) are hidden characters, baits, or in Ermacs case a glitch that people thought to be a hidden character.

Like someone here said, it was cheaper to include them because you just had 1 actor in 1 costume do 2-3 peoples worth of moves, then they switch the palette and you can have 4-5 characters for 1.5 characters worth of ROM space. Ryu, Ken, Akuma, and Dan were head swaps like that too (in SF Alpha 1 - they changed a few little bits after that).

Classic Sub was there because people hated his looks in vanilla MK3.

And in their defense, back in MK2 all the palette swaps had unique stances and specials, so they were nothing alike.

It was un UMK3 where they went full retard and gave everyone the same two stances, and have a lot of repeating animations for moves (3 ninjas had the same teleport jump, 4 ninjas used the same palm motion for a projectile, winposes were recycled in fatalities, etc).

the "ermac was originally a bug" myth is just that and has been debunked for years. there's nothing in an MK1 cabinet that would make "ERMAC" appear as a character's name. however, didn't stop people from spreading that rumour in the 90s, and thus the character was born

>>3967592
nice citation you got there.

>>3967592
>there's nothing in an MK1 cabinet that would make "ERMAC" appear as a character's name.

The service menu has a diagnostics count for "ERMACs" (for ERRor MACros), and there was some palette bug that made the ninjas appear red.

People just assumed that the mythical hidden red ninja was Ermac, and the game would count how many time you get to fight him.

>"Ermac" is an anagram for "Cream"

What did Midway mean by this?

>>3967615
>the taiwanese version of super mario 3 is called doki doki panic in japan
causes you to wonder

>>3966252
>it wasn't just telling your art department to draw some new sprites. They had to hire an actor, make a physical costume and then film them doing all the shit they wanted.
I get the impression that taking photos of a dude and turning them into sprites would be a lot less work than drawing a whole spriteset for a fighting game character from scratch.
Also, the sprites being handdrawn wouldn't prevent them from doing so many palette-swapped ninjas.
And some of the MK actors played multiple non-paletteswap characters anyways.

My guess for the real reason is that all of them besides sub-zero and scorpion started out as "special", non-playable characters, so once each of them was made playable, they had already been established as palette swaps so it couldn't be helped, same for Jade and robot-smoke. The only deliberate palette swaps were sub-zero and scorpion, Kitana/Milenna and Cyrax/Sektor.

>>3967605

from the wiki:

In the first few arcade versions of Mortal Kombat, there was a listing in the audit menu for "ERMACS". In Revision 3.0, it was actually listed directly underneath "Reptile Battles" giving the appearance that they were grouped together. It was believed to reference a character the same way "Reptile Battles" does which led people to believe that Ermac was also a secret character. The Ermac listing is a shortening of the term "Error Macro". This is referenced in a hidden reversed message in Mortal Kombat: Deception's Konquest mode which states "It is a little known fact that Ermac is short for Error Macro". Electronic Gaming Monthly published a photo to accompany a letter from Tony Casey reporting an alleged encounter.[1] However, Ermac did not appear in any version. There is also no naturally occurring default character palette that would provide a full palette swap for Ermac. Ed Boon later confirmed in a Tweet that the Error Macro was simply a macro created to catch coding errors/traps.[2]