From arcade glitches to urban legends coming true, Ermac is probably the most iconic ninja in Mortal Kombat and one of the best secret characters in the game.
For many reasons, the early Mortal Kombat games are memorable. They led to the creation of the ESRB rating system, popularized blood in fighting games, created an iconic competitive arcade game, and spawned a very successful franchise. An often overlooked innovation of the first three Mortal Kombat games is that it helped popularize secret characters in fighting games. Although MK is not the first series with secret characters, it certainly has some more well-known examples.
Noob Saibot, Jade, Reptile, and Smoke all started their franchise as secret characters, and these characters made mysterious hints through in-game dialogue and contextual clues. Although Reptile is the first secret character in Mortal Kombat, there are few iconic hidden characters like Ermac. Although the story of Ermac in the current Mortal Kombat timeline may be well-known to fans, the story behind his joining the series is legendary in the game.
Related: Mortal Kombat's Fred Tatasciore teases his upcoming Warner Animation project
Rumors of a secret character in the original Mortal Kombat arcade version will become the catalyst for Ermac's creation. In the third edition of Mortal Kombat, a strange line of text "Ermacs" was added to the game's debug screen. Ermacs stands for "error macro" and is a way for the game to track and catch any possible script errors that may occur. This term is not used outside of Midway, so the average arcade player will not fully know what this means.
Speculation about a possible second secret character in Mortal Kombat began to emerge. The game already has reptiles, if very specific conditions are met, players can fight in special encounters. The connection between Ermac and Reptile is simply due to the error macro counter on the debug screen located directly below the number of times the player encounters Reptile.
Related: Warner Bros. Multiversus leak reveals screenshots, stage
After fans began to guess, many people went to arcade games to try to figure out how to unlock this mysterious hidden fighter. The only problem is that Ermac is actually not real, at least at this point. This is just a misunderstanding caused by an unknown term being added to the game's debug screen. Some people claim that some versions of Mortal Kombat have a glitch, namely that the name of Ermac will replace the name of their fighter's health bar, but given the way the game code handles the text, this proves to be impossible.
The Ermac rumors spread further after a story about readers who claimed to have met Ermac was published in the monthly video game magazine. The story also includes a picture allegedly taken by a reader with a red ninja and the text "Ermac Wins". Although this photo is actually just an edited photo of Scorpian, this EGM story is the earliest known example of Ermac wearing red.
Related: Mortal Kombat creators share video of Scorpion’s iconic killing
Even after the release of Mortal Kombat 2, Midway Games still maintained the rumors and never directly answered whether Ermac is in the sequel. And a hidden message is "Ermac does not exist". It can be found that series creators Ed Boon and John Tobias always keep very mysterious answers to the existence of Ermac. Although Ermac has completely turned from an arcade rumor into a game urban legend, he is still not an official Mortal Kombat character.
This will change with the release of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, because Ermac will eventually become the classic kombatant in the MK universe. In an interview with The Gameological Society in 2012, Ed Boon explained that the development team wanted to make the urban legend of Ermac a reality. In many ways, Ermac started out as a fan-created character, voluntarily existed through speculation and rumors. Even his palette was technically created by fans of the series through an EGM scam.
Although Ermac may not be the first or only secret character in Mortal Kombat, he does have the characteristics of being a fan-made fighter and has been widely displayed throughout the series. Since Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, Ermac has appeared in 11 different MK games, and all but two of them can be played. To date, he is one of the most iconic ninja characters in the series, and is undoubtedly one of the most important secret characters of all time.
Read on: Forget Persona 6, where is the arena in Persona 5?
Becoming a CBR writer since September 2020, Jacob Creswell is a lifelong writer and gamer. Wrote for local and global publications. Lovers of Animal Crossing, Undertale, Team Fortress 2, and a little professional wrestling. It can often be found that more research has been done than is required for his video game theory. You can also find it on his Twitter, @Creaology98