One of the creators of Mortal Kombat characters should be cut from the roster in future entries, to make way for new characters.
The biggest fighting games of the early '90s started out in the arcades. The developers then had the unenviable task of porting them to the home consoles popular at the time, which meant that graphics had to be downgraded, content had to be censored, and some characters were left on the cutting room floor. This was just before CD-ROMs became commonplace in gaming, so memory was at a . Nowadays, Masahiro Sakurai can fit as many characters as he wants into Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, but the arcade games and cartridges of the 16-bit era had to limit their scope.
The original Mortal Kombat managed to include seven playable characters and two unplayable bosses. The sequel, Mortal Kombat 2, featured twelve playable characters, but a few familiar faces were missing from the roster. This was due to a hidden feature in the arcade cabinets of the original Mortal Kombat, which allowed developers to know which Mortal Kombat fighters were being used.
Mortal Kombat Fighters: Death By Popularity
Mortal Kombat co-creator John Tobias has explained the secret data collection method on Kano and Sonya Blade being cut from the sequel, as they were the least-chosen Mortal Kombat fighters.
It's surprising that Sonya was so unpopular in the original Mortal Kombat, considering that the popularity of the female fighters in Virtua Fighter led to lore of the Mortal Kombat franchise was built around these changes in order to explain why certain characters were present in one game, but not in another. Over time the memory limitations vanished, and the developers were free to include as many fighters as they liked.
The character auditing method wasn't exactly scientific, but this was the early '90s, so the developers didn't have many options available to them. It would have been more accurate if the developers were able to collate data from around the country, rather than just local places in Chicago. The Mortal Kombat series was infamous for its secrets, but no one knew that one of them was literally determining the fates of its characters.
Source: John Tobias/Twitter
