Thread by @therealsaibot

Funny thing is, I just realized that Smoke/Jade as secret characters in #MortalKombat 2 may have been part of an elaborate joke on me by @noobde ... (thread)

https://twitter.com/rua_lar/status/1383029285317971978

I believe having Smoke and Jade poke out from the trees in MK2’s Living Forest was Ed or Tony Goskie’s idea. Secret characters in MK were a huge part of the mystique that defined the series... (1/14)

While I was aware of Smoke/Jade during development of MK2, the adding of secret characters didn’t start out that way. On MK1, I had no idea that Ed had added a green tinted ninja and named him Reptile... (2/14)

I think I found out about Reptile only after players had discovered him and I had somehow missed his entry in the game audits... (3/14)

I vaguely remember confronting Ed on it and asking him to please let me know when he adds a secret character or secret anything to the games. 😠

I don’t remember explicitly, but I can imagine him nodding... ‘Sure no problem. Won’t happen again.’ 😉 (4/14)

Later, when rumors about a secret character called Ermac started making the rounds, I had to actually go to Ed to confirm that Ermac was not in the game even tho I knew ERMACS was an error macro entry in our diagnostics menu... (5/14)

On MK2, we came up with Smoke/Jade well after we had recorded the actors. In fact, we had no concept of any secret character during any of our tapings... (6/14)

But Smoke/Jade were planned secret characters in the sense that I created the palettes and smoke puffs. Tony Goskie created the peeking images and we teased players by having them appear in the forest...

This time there would be no Reptile-like surprises from Ed... (7/14)

Many months after MK2’s release in the arcades, rumors began circulating about a third secret character. In fact, we were deep into MK3 development and none of us knew anything about a third secret character in MK2... except for Ed. (8/14)

Not only had Ed snuck a third secret character into MK2 behind our backs, it felt like he was poking fun at me by naming it Noob Saibot. It was like... ‘Hey John, I got your secret character right here.’ 😆 (9/14)

It shows the lengths that Ed would go to hide stuff in MK. What made it so elaborate is that I think the creation of Smoke and Jade was a ruse. A diversion of our attention while Ed slipped in Noob Saibot...

Next level mind f*ckery. (10/14)

What reminded me of all of this is that someone recently shared a video of me and a few team members taken during MK3 and pointed out that in the video we come up with Noob/Saibot as possible names for what became Sektor/Cyrax... (11/14)

He was confused... why would we be coming up with using our names backward during MK3 if Noob Saibot already existed in MK2? After chatting w Ed about it we remembered
that the answer is because the team wasn’t yet aware of Noob Saibot’s existence. (12/14)

I created backstories for the secret characters when we made them playable in later games. At some point I gave Ed a rainbow assortment of color palettes for him to go to town adding secret characters. I don’t know what he did w them and I didn’t want to know... (13/14)

To this day, when I am asked if all of MK’s early secrets have been found... I’ll answer with a semi-confidant ‘yes?’

Only Ed truly knows. (14/14)

I should add... credit to @MikeMcWhertor for raising the Noob Saibot naming question.