The new Mortal Kombat game Mortal Kombat 1 is still rolling out new fighters for its Kombat Pass, and the next one on the way has now been officially teased. It’s Ermac and the first official teaser for this character has now been shared on the official Mortal Kombat social media account.
The full trailer for Ermac will be released later this week. The current teaser shows a brief exchange between Kung Lao and Ermac. The same teaser also reveals Mavado – the next Kameo fighter coming to Mortal Kombat 1.
Ed Boon also provided a detailed history of how Ermac came to be before the reveal of the gameplay trailer this week:
Ed Boon: 30+ years ago we worked on the first one #MortalKombat game. The game software had parts of the code that (theoretically) should never reach/execute. If it did, it incremented a counter that would record an ERROR. We also created a “Game Audit” screen where we could check this counter in the arcades.
To keep each log short, I wrote an assembly MACRO that would call all the necessary functions in one line of code. The macro was called ERMAC… short for Error Macro.Unfortunately or fortunately, we listed the number of ERMACS that occurred right after the score/number of times players fought REPTIL, who was a hidden fighter in the first Mortal Kombat.
This (of course) led players to speculate that ERMAC was another hidden character, like REPTIL. Soon the rumors of ERMAC became legend with players insisting on fighting him. They didn’t.
In Mortal Kombat 2, we made REPTILA a playable fighter and added 3 new hidden fighters: Smoke, Jade, and Noob Saibot. But some players were still looking for Ermac.
For MK3, we decided to turn some of the myths into reality, starting with ANIMALS. Finally in Ultimate MK3 (running out of colors) we finally added ERMAC as an actual (red ninja) fighter to the roster.
Over the years, he has made several appearances in MK games. It now has a full story/history and is part of MK lore.
We would never (like ever) have guessed that this red ninja with a funny name would end up being such a big part of Mortal Kombat history and still running over 30 years later! But here we are, he’s about to join the list #MortalKombat1
Game Announcement THIS WEEK!
