When you look at where video games are now and then think about where they were in the earliest days of arcades and systems, you honestly have to wonder how game developers made such complete titles without having many bugs or glitches. If you think about game devs today, you can rarely, if ever, picture a AAA title not having a Day 1 Patch or various hotfixes to overcome some of the lingering issues with the game after it releases. But back in the day, that wasn’t an option. However, in the case of Mortal Kombat, a fix wasn’t needed for a certain game-breaking but simply because players rarely did the basic thing that caused it.
Ed Boon helped share an interesting story online when a Twitter handle revealed a hilarious tidbit from the past. When Mortal Kombat II was in the arcades for early testing, there was a game-breaking glitch involving Kung Lao. Specifically, the game would crash when he teleported in the game while facing a CPU character.
Even in the early days of gaming, that would’ve been a bad thing to endure. However, as the tweet noted and Ed Boon confirmed, the team didn’t need to fix that glitch because it rarely happened. By that, they meant that rarely anyone played against the CPU! Instead, they would always play with someone else, and thus the glitch was able to be fixed later so further testing could be done.
So what we have here is a bug that could’ve been the “worst thing ever,” and it turned into a “non-starter” to an extent because the game was so good that people wanted to test their might against other people instead of the computer. That’s pretty cool.
You could also argue that it may also have been that they never played Kung Lao against the computer, but let’s not ruin the moment.
All these years later, Ed Boon is still leading the charge in making the franchise bigger and better. We know the 12th mainline entry is coming, possibly this year. Boon even decided to do his version of an April Fool joke by asking fans if dropping info on the game that day was a good idea. Thankfully, no follow-ups were made.
Given the success of the last three mainline titles, NetherRealm Studios, who now headlines the development of the series, will be working their butts off to keep things fun and ensure no game-breaking glitches are there.
