Trivia / Mortal Kombat 3

• 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.
• Actor Leaves, Character Dies: Johnny Cage died prior to the events of this game because of Daniel Pesina's acrimonious departure from Midway.
• Approval of God: Lia Montelongo (Sindel) and Kerri Hoskins (Sonya) are huge supporters of fan art and tributes to their MK3 appearance and will often promote said fan works on their social media accounts.
• Ascended Fanon: Ermac's name was originally a bit of misunderstood text on a debug screen in MK. Fans believed he was going to be a playable character. Midway took the playable bit and canonized it.
• Dummied Out:
  • Sheeva in the Super NES and Genesis versions of Ultimate, because of memory constraints that came with the cast expansion. To compensate, they added Noob Saibot and Rain (the purple ninja who only appeared in the game's attract mode) as playable characters, and eliminated the need for Ultimate Kombat Kodes to play with Ermac, Mileena and Classic Sub-Zero (who are available from the start). However, all of Sheeva's in-game data was kept (only her sprites were removed) and they're still accessible via hacking, allowing players to control an invisible Sheeva.
    • As an interesting twist, the SNES version has a technically legitimate way to play as Sheeva, albeit limited to one mode only, and also depends on chance. If you enter Endurance VS mode (by holding L and R when you hit Start), you can hit Up + the Start button to allow random select for all eight of your characters. Sometimes one of your picks will be a blue E in a green background (the Endurance Match icon in the Arcade ladders), which corresponds to Sheeva's removed portrait sprite, and when that character comes up in your rotation, you'll be playing as her.
  • A LOT got taken out in the beta build of the N64 version of Trilogy. Originally, all characters present had all of their animation frames intact, the Bank and Khan's Arena stages were available (in the latter case, Baraka and Raiden were prisoners instead of Sonya and Kano with new sprites of course). Many of the missing male voice files were also present and accurately assigned to their original characters (but still compressed and shortened), the unmasked Sub-Zero was also fully playable with his finishers intact and the monochrome Animalities still had their morphing animations as opposed to the puff of smoke we ended up getting and the game had an overall much closer feel to UMK3 than its disc counterparts.
  • Friendships were set to be in the Game Boy port. All of the original commands work and a 'Friendship' message are in the game's code, and can be triggered with a Game Genie code. There's no special animations however.
• He Also Did: One of the lead programmers for the PC/DOS ports of MK 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 MK3 and Ultimate, but brought back in Trilogy with the same sprite set used in MK2 (except for the all-new running animation); same as Baraka, who had been played by Richard Divizio and, therefore, came back with his MKII 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.
• Refitted for Sequel: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• 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.
• Updated Re-release: Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 was created by Midway to mollify arcade owners for the relatively short period between the arcade launch and the release of the home ports (only 6 months compared to about a year as with the previous two games) and to mollify fans for the omission of several popular characters (especially Scorpion) in the original version. As it's the only version of the game to have been included in the Arcade Kollection re-release, it's widely considered the definitive version of Mortal Kombat 3.
  • Other consoles got the Dream Match Game Mortal Kombat Trilogy.
• Urban Legend of Zelda:
  • You could supposedly get Scorpion, Reptile, Jade, Kitana, and Mileena in vanilla MK3.
  • Brutalities were based on rumors of 100% combos. (Which do exist.)
• What Could Have Been:
  • Before they were named, Sektor and Cyrax were called Ketchup and Mustard by the team.
  • Sindel's working name can be seen as "Muchacha" in pre-release screenshots.
  • Midway was going to release an HD version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, with new motion capture actors and updated graphics, but said project was cancelled by Warner Bros. when they had acquired the company. Also notable is the fact that Elizabeth Malecki was going to reprise her role as Sonya Blade, after years of absence from the franchise.
  • Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3: WaveNet Edition, a special version of UMK3 that was only ever location tested. Had it been released, it would have been considered the "final" arcade revision of the game. It allegedly featured many new balance changes that would serve to nerf the top tier characters like Kabal and get rid of the infinite combos from certain characters such as Kung Lao and Stryker. It is also the only known arcade version of the game to feature Noob Saibot as a playable secret character, chosen either through entering a Kombat Kode or by selecting Kano and inputting the code to select Human Smoke. He allegedly would have been somewhat accurate to his Trilogy counterpart, with the Tele-Slam being advertised as his signature move.
• Working Title: According to an old prototype, Trilogy was originally going to be called Mortal Kombat Kronicles.

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