Digging the Secrets of Mortal Kombat 2

Around 13 years ago, when i was a lil' chap doing my fourth grade, i came across this rather awesome game at my cousin's place.Having only played the 8-bit games on my NES machine, i was rather mesmerized by this fantastic beat em up game called "Mortal Kombat 2". The story was way cool and since i hadn't played its prequel, there was this strange mystery surrounding the game. Being a hardcore fan of the Street Fighter series then, i really loved all kinds of beat em up games. The moment i finished seeing the intro of mk2, i knew that this was pretty different and way cooler than anything i've ever seen.



Playing it was pretty difficult back then. I wasn't used to playing with computers much (didn't own one till 1995). My cousin taught me this neat trick win the game easily (which would be the first "hack" i ever used). All i had to do was make the character duck (by holding the 'down' arrow) in a 'Very Easy' mode game. The opponent wouldn't be able to attack you then.He/She would just come near and start punching above your head. All you have to do is keep punching him while ducking. That's a funny programming flaw which can be easily exploited. Anyway, i defeated most of the guys till i reached this huge four-handed guy by the name of "Kintaro"!.


He whopped my ass !!!. The trick didn't work with him at all. He would pounce on you and crush the poop out of you!... he would block most flying kicks and retaliate by hammering you down to the ground. He was one bad-ass and still remains in my list of toughest game opponents ever. Anyway, i had to leave my cousin's place without winning the game. I wanted to keep going to his place... poor me !


Aug 1995 !! ... whoopee ! ... i got my first PC!!." Pentium I 133 Mhz - 1.3 Gb HD - 16Mb SD RAm ". The hottest machine of the age. The only games that came with it was this quiz game in encarta encyclopedia called Mind Maze... but no mortal kombat 2 ...Anyway, i started collecting games from my pals. And one day i get this game from my cousin called Ultima 7:The Black Gate, which would change my life forever (alas, that is an another tale). Finally it was around 1997, when i finally get hold of Mortal Kombat 2. Same Story... Kintaro kicks my ass. This was the time when i started playing with Hex editors. You needed Hex editors back then if you had to patch games. Life wasn't all that easy then... you had to manually replace hex codes on .exes yourself (ofcourse, with instructions) to get things done. Mortal Kombat is a game with a lot of secrets... from new characters to hidden layers and most of them were documented on the Internet.


"Hexedit mk2.exe"- my mind says. I needed to know what was in this small file... I don't quite remember the hexeditor that i used then... all i could see was a bunch of numbers and alphabets (hex) and some strings on the side. I began to follow the strings ... follow ... follow ... Tic Toc ... Tic Toc ... Whoa !! Whats this i see ??... i notice text from the game - texts like "Lui Kang Wins","Fatality" etc. Nice. I notice the names of the secret characters as well. But there's something else as well...


More Secret Characters and Finishing Moves !!! ... Some of these characters are the programmers themselves ... On of them (Tanya)later appears in MK 4(which i didn't know then). Treasure!. Did some searching on the Internet and found nothing related to this. Sure, there were lots of info about the already know facts. And so, i post my first thread in some mk2 forum. The response was dumb ... No one was interested. I couldn't do anything about it... i was just a kid back then who only knew how to code stuff in BASIC. Assembly was way out of my league... I give up



Now here i am, 13 years later, playing that old game after a long gap. I think i'm able find out more about those secrets that i had discovered eight years ago. There's still nothing about it now. I owe it to that curious lad from the 90's. I can speak asm now (though not fluent)

Just a little time and concentration, that's all it takes to be ...'God'.


I'll keep posting my progress on uncovering those hidden secrets, if it all i make any ;-)