Thread by @therealsaibot

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!