It was just a misconception brought on by an unknown term being added to the game's debug screen. The only problem was that Ermac wasn't actually real, at least at this point.
ULTIMATE MORTAL KOMBAT 3 UNLOCK CHARACTERS HOW TO
Once fans began speculating, many took to the arcade to try and figure out how to unlock this mysterious hidden fighter. Multiversus Leak Reveals Screenshots, Stages The connection between Ermac and Reptile was only furthered by the error macro counter on the debug screen was located directly below the number of times the player had encountered Reptile. The game already had Reptile, who players could fight in a special encounter if very specific conditions were met. Speculation began to arise surrounding a possible second secret character in Mortal Kombat. This term wasn't used outside of Midway, so it wouldn't exactly be expected for the average arcade player to know what this meant. Ermacs stood for "error macros" and was a way for the game to keep track of and catch any possible script errors that might occur. In the third revision of Mortal Kombat, a curious line of text reading "Ermacs" was added to the game's debug screen. Rumors surrounding a secret character in the original Mortal Kombat's arcade release would be the catalyst for Ermac's creation. RELATED: Mortal Kombat's Fred Tatasciore Teases His Upcoming Warner Animation Projects
ULTIMATE MORTAL KOMBAT 3 UNLOCK CHARACTERS SERIES
While Ermac's story within the current Mortal Kombat timeline might be fairly well-known to fans, the story behind his addition to the series is legendary within gaming. While Reptile holds the distinction of being the first secret character in a Mortal Kombat game, there are few hidden kombatants quite as iconic as Ermac. Noob Saibot, Jade, Reptile and Smoke all got their start in the franchise as secret characters that were cryptically hinted at through in-game dialogue and context clues. While MK wasn't the first series to have secret characters, it certainly has some of the more well-known examples. An often-overlooked innovation of the first three Mortal Kombat games is that it helped popularize secret characters in fighting games. They led to the creation of the ESRB rating system, popularized gore in fighting games, created an iconic competitive arcade game and spawned an incredibly successful franchise. The early Mortal Kombatgames were monumental for a lot of reasons.