At the time, the game’s developers never addressed the veracity of the rumors that lead to Ermac’s creation, which only fueled speculation that Ermac did, in fact, exist in earlier games. Still, the rumor persisted and Ermac eventually debuted in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 as a playable character. Doctored photos would proliferate this rumor, but none of it was ever true - “ERMAC” was shorthand for “ERROR MACRO,” and was simply a programming variable that tracked error codes thrown by the arcade machine’s logic boards. This rumor would slowly build upon itself as “ERMAC” continued to appear in the debug menus of future Mortal Kombat arcade revisions, with some individuals (and trade magazines) claiming that they had even seen Ermac in-game as a red ninja with unique abilities. The term “ERMAC” appeared in these menus in close proximity to the Reptile statistics, and this lead players to believe that an additional secret character named Ermac had yet to be discovered. These menus also tended to have statistics about the game itself, a could tell owners how many times Reptile had been successfully summoned, for instance. Back then, arcade machines had secret menus that allowed technicians to test monitors, speakers, and the logic boards themselves, in order to troubleshoot where an issue was coming from.
#ERMAC MORTAL KOMBAT 11 CODE#
The oldest and perhaps most prolific of all Characters That Didn’t Actually Exist but Eventually Would, Ermac started life as a debug code in the arcade release of the original Mortal Kombat. Four of these rumors were so persistent that they eventually became real Mortal Kombat characters, debuting in-canon as recently as 2011.
Much in the same way, legitimate secret characters like Reptile and Smoke often found themselves in the company of complete fabrications when recess story time rolled around. Fatalities, for instance, had to be figured out by players armed with knee-high stacks of quarters, which lead to many stories of “I heard Character X can do Y Fatality if you meet Z requirement.” Almost none of these stories were true, but the information about legitimate Fatalities followed the exact same formula, and that gave credibility to all the false ones floating around. The Mortal Kombat series, back in those days, traded heavily on its own mysterious nature.
#ERMAC MORTAL KOMBAT 11 HOW TO#
We didn’t have the Internet back then, so most people learned how to play these games through word of mouth, and that lead to a lot of disreputable information getting spread around as fact.
Back in my day, we had these things called “arcades,” which were sorta like Steam but in real life, typically found in archaic social/shopping structures called “malls.” (Malls were like IRL Amazon.) Video games were released in these giant wooden boxes that had controls and screens built-in, and instead of buying the whole game, you just paid a little bit every time you wanted to play one.
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