The source code of the years 1993 Mortal Kombat 2 was posted on GitHub over the holidays, allegedly revealing new artwork and an alternate scenario. Now Warner Bros.’ lawyers got involved, filing a DMCA takedown request which GitHub honored. Of course, all of this has attracted renewed attention on the run.
The code landed on GitHub in a December 27 post, and with it, images of another, attract mode screen set up the narrative of the fighting game. The story is always the same; Shang Tsung, pleading for his life, gets a reprieve from Shao Khan. Shang Tsung then lures the Earthrealm fighters to fight a tournament in the Outworld “where they will meet certain death by Shao Kahn himself”.
Image: NetherRealm Studios via tehdrawsus_MK on Twitter
The alternate screen has the same image of Shao Kahn flexing, but places it against a background showing a dimensional portal with dark evil wizards in the background. it doesn’t really change mortal combat 2but it goes one step further to sell the idea that non-playable bosses Kintaro and Shao Kahn have field advantage in Outworld.
On Friday, someone from Warner Bros. Discovery (the parent company of NetherRealm Studios and thus the copyright holder of Mortal Kombat) sent a DMCA request to GitHub, which then deleted the site’s hardware archive. It was uploaded by the historical source of the userwhich has already published the source code of other old video games.
The source code dump also revealed more fighter animations, combos and moves which were not used in the arcade game. Mortal Kombat fans have already combed through everythingfinding a scrapped Shao Kahn death (his fist goes through a portal above his victim’s head, crushing him flat) as well as Reptile performing an acid spit in the air, among others.
Polygon reached out to WB Games and NetherRealm Studios for comment on the leaked code and cutting room animations.
