/vr/ - Retro Games

Looking back it seems UMK3 was indeed the plan from the start, I mean Tobias has the female ninja on his monitor during MK3 production like the other anon pointed out.

And we also have a pic of John Turk in his Scorpion costume together with Bret Hart, which after some deducing means they digitized the WWF stars shortly after the MK3 shoot.
meaning that they never went back to digitize the male and female ninja, they shot them DURING MK3 production
most likely they had planned UMK3 from the start and figured they could make the UMK3 update look bigger by just withholding the ninja sprites from MK3 and then palette swapping them to hell for UMK3.

Pretty clever, I wonder if they realized people would not react well to MK without the ninjas?

But the biggest question remains, was Chris Alexander digitized as Johnny Cage during this time?

For a long time now it was assumed that he was digitized for Mortal Kombat Trilogy, but looking into that you see that this was actually created by three different software companies.
I just don't see them working together on this.

Furthermore, concept art drawn by John Tobias exists of MKT Cage, does this mean he was added but ultimately not made the cut for MK3/UMK3 due to the Pesina lawsuit?

It's starting to look more and more like they had already finished all of these characters during MK3 production but knew they were gonna release an updated version a couple months later.

Which means that the full sized original MK3 Cage sprites exist somewhere.

Someone should ask Tobias on Twitter about this, would be interesting to hear his thoughts on the matter.