Mortal Kombat 3/Trivia

• Acting for Two: Richard Divizio as Kano and Kabal, Sal Divita as Nightwolf and the robot ninjas, and John Turk as Shang Tsung and Sub-Zero. John Turk and Becky Gable both played all the masked ninjas in Ultimate as well.
• Ascended Fanon: Ermac was originally a bit of misunderstood text on a debug screen in Mortal Kombat. Fans believed he was going to be a playable character. Midway took the playable bit and canonized it. Likewise, his palette (red) was merely a graphical error. The costume used to record the animations for the masked fighters in the original game was red and if the game couldn't load the right color, it would default to this. When he was made an official character, he was given that same red hue.
• He Also Did/Retroactive Recognition: One of the lead programmers for the PC/DOS ports of Mortal Kombat 3 was Oren Peli, who would go on to produce/write/direct the original Paranormal Activity.
• The Other Darrin: Only half of the cast from the previous two games returned, namely Richard Divizio (Kano and Baraka), John Parrish (Jax), Tony Marquez (Kung Lao) and Brian Glynn (Shao Kahn), which led to the other returning characters being played by new actors. Ho Sung Pak (Liu Kang) and Elizabeth Malecki (Sonya Blade) were replaced by Eddie Wong and Kerri Hoskins respectively, while John Turk replaced both, Dan Pesina (as Sub-Zero) and Philip Ahn (as Shang Tsung).
  • John Turk eventually got to play all the other masked ninjas in Ultimate (replacing Pesina again) alongside Becky Gable, who replaced Katalin Zamiar as Kitana and the other female ninjas.
  • Chris Alexander was brought in to replace Dan Pesina as Johnny Cage in Trilogy, who was one of the few characters needed to fill the entire roster from the first three entries. Averted by Carlos Pesina, whose character Raiden was left out in Mortal Kombat 3 and Ultimate, but brought back in Trilogy with the same sprite set used in Mortal Kombat II (except for the all-new running animation); same as Baraka, who had been played by Richard Divizio and, therefore, came back with his Mortal Kombat II sprites intact, plus a run animation and a new move.
    • This is also the reason why only four characters (the aforementioned Kano, Jax, Kung Lao and Raiden) have "past" versions of themselves available in the Playstation and Saturn versions.
• Romance on the Set: With Lia Montelongo (Sindel) and Brian Glynn (Shao Kahn), who dated until 2001. It may influenced in the fake marriage between the two characters.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: Armageddon's engine couldn't handle a four-footed fighter, so the developers were faced with the choice of cutting Motaro down to two legs, or removing him from the game entirely. They went with the former, giving the storyline explanation of a curse caused by the Shokan.
• Urban Legend of Zelda:
  • You could supposedly get Scorpion, Reptile, Jade, Kitana and Mileena in vanilla Mortal Kombat 3.
  • Brutalities were based on rumors of 100% combos (which do exist).
• What Could Have Been: Tremor was stated to appear in Trilogy, but was scrapped in favor of Rain.