John Tobias Profile picture
Sep 22, 2022 11 tweets 6 min read Read on X
Here’s a recently discovered image of the very first drawing of #MortalKombat’s dragon icon. I designed the icon as both a symbol of our game and its fictional tournament… (thread) #MK30
The image comes from fellow MK artist John Vogel’s video taped footage used to digitize my pencil drawing. We traced over the digitized image with pixels for use in the game… (2/9)
The inspiration to use a dragon as the fictional tournament’s symbol came from “Dragon Attack,” which was in contention as our game’s title before @noobde and I changed it to “Mortal Kombat.” Here’s my rough marker sketch of the marquee logo… (3/9)
The name “Dragon Attack” came from @noobde’s love for the band Queen and their song of the same title. I used the colors described in the lyrics of that song on our eventual coin-op cabinet design… (4/9)

The inspiration for the dragon icon’s design started when John Vogel saw a golden dragon statue on the desk of Midway’s general manager, Ken Fedesna. John borrowed it to digitize for use in our game’s backgrounds. Here’s a frame from that footage… (5/9)
I saw the dragon statue and thought of using an Asian inspired dragon design as part of our coin-op cabinet’s side panel art. Here are my sketches… (6/9)
I had been thinking of creating an icon to represent the fictional tournament, but also to brand the game with a symbol… like Superman’s “S” or Batman’s bat symbol. I used the dragon from my cabinet side panel sketch to inform the look of the dragon icon as our symbol… (7/9)
Up until MKII we used the icon facing both left and right. With Acclaim’s console releases, we had to pick one or the other for trademarking purposes. We chose facing right and it’s been that way ever since… (8/9)
Here’s my earliest icon doodle recently found by @youngsaibot while poking around an old sketchbook in my office. The eventual icon design was an attempt at replicating the yin yang symbol, which represented balancing of the furies- a core part of MK’s early fiction. (9/9)
Side Note: I almost tossed the dragon icon sketch aside when I was at home working on it at my drafting table and my sister mistook the dragon for a seahorse ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Bonus Kontent: @noobde recently snapped a photo of the actual dragon statue that we used… 30 years later!

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More from @therealsaibot

Apr 22, 2021
Like Kitana/Mileena, #Scorpion & #SubZero also make a pretty good PB&J. One completes the other. But, if we dig deeper with each, we can uncover individual story arcs...

Let’s sit Scorpion on the couch for a psychoanalysis of his path thru early #MortalKombat games (thread)
Scorpion was never a very complex character. His archetype in MK1 was a hunter fueled by revenge. Man on a mission. That singular focus is why he has always worked so well as a character.

We all understand the visceral motivation of revenge... (1/10) Image
But, what happens after revenge is realized? That exploration is what defined Scorpion’s story arch post MK1. I don’t know that we conveyed it particularly well, but laying it out can help clarify what happened to Scorpion in the early games... (2/10)
Read 12 tweets
Apr 17, 2021
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)
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)
Read 16 tweets
Apr 15, 2021
Motaro’s story was told through Sheeva, and his race of Centaurs were introduced as rivals of the Shokan. Both races had histories w Outworld’s Emperor Shao Kahn, but Motaro’s prominence as a boss in MK3 was meant to imply that he had curried favor... (1/4)
We never had a chance to delve into Motaro or his race in detail, but we imagined him as an opportunistic leader who took advantage of Shokan defiance to Kahn’s throne. We also had hoped that we could explore Edenian politics post-Kahn’s rule... (2/4)
We touched on this in the MK4 Collector’s Edition Comic Book. There, Queen Sindel and Kitana were left to clean up the mess left behind by Shao Kahn’s tyranny... (3/4) Image
Read 4 tweets
Apr 6, 2021
#MortalKombat has always trafficked in rumors and mystery. But, our choices behind character ‘deaths’ in the early games were always calculated...

Not the end of match Fatality kind of deaths. I’m talking about the not returning in a sequel fiction altering kind... (thread)
Lots of things changed for us between MK1 and MK2. One thing that didn’t change was a memory limitation. While we had more of it for MK2 we still didn’t have quite enough, which forced us into hard choices... (1/10)
Ed and I wanted to add as many new characters to the MK2 roster as possible. This meant that we were going to have to leave a couple behind. How to make that choice? (2/10)
Read 11 tweets
Apr 1, 2021
I thought that Michael Grimm being Johnny Cage’s original name was MKHistory101. But, so many players today weren’t even born when the early games were released...

So, here’s a history lesson on how your favorite nut punching Hollywood action star came to be... (thread)
Immediately after the thought of doing a 1v1 fighting game smacked me and Ed Boon in the face, we wanted to tie a license to it. Seemed like the best way to get a project approved by Midway management... (1/13)
Our licensing director, Roger Sharp, had recently presented our department with a slate of possible licenses. One of them was Universal Soldier starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. Ed and I weren’t interested in Universal Soldier, but we thought maybe it was an inroad to JCVD...(2/13)
Read 14 tweets
Nov 28, 2020
The name was inspired by the Mongolian warlords Ghengis and Kublai Khan. And, although we never explicitly state it, much like the mongols our intention was that Kahn was a title. So, there could have been Kahn’s before Shao and there could be Kahns after (thread)...
In old MK, we never explored Shao Kahn’s backstory other than his relationships with Shang, Kitana/Mileena, Sindel and any drama related to the current tournaments. I preferred keeping his origin vague because it kept the focus on his actions specific to Edenia and Earth...
Also, seeing as how yesterday was your birthday, here’s a bit of indirect Shao Kahn lore that was lost over the years...
Read 10 tweets

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