Game-Art-HQ

Sub Zero MK One

Debut of the Ice Shot

Fatality!!

Back in 1992, Scorpion and Sub Zero shared many of the same sprites just like Ryu and Ken in Street Fighter II. This was done to save resources and allowed the developers to add more characters while having more storage for other parts of a game, like speech, background graphics, and music.

In the later games, especially Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 which had 7 male ninjas who were all wearing the same ninja outfit with only their colors being different and they overdid it a bit though and were often criticized for the many “Ninja Palette Swaps”

Today, Scorpion, Sub Zero, Reptile, Ermac, etc. are all still Ninjas and were in Mk9 but all with very different looks and animations.

Sub Zero, the Lin Kuei Ninja who was supposed to be responsible for the death of Scorpion introduced the ice-shot to the fighting game genre, a move which froze the opponent and is still today used by around 15-20 other fighting game characters, more or less every 2D fighting game today has at least one character with a similar move.

Funny enough Sub Zero would freeze himself if he would attack an already frozen opponent again with Ice, this can be used for some fun mirror matches 🙂

While Sub Zero’s role changed a lot during the Mortal Kombat games, he was always a fan favorite and became one of the main protagonists in some of the background stories

This is Sub Zero in his classic Mortal Kombat I design, the illustration was drawn by Kachakacha from Japan as a part of the Game-Art-HQ Mortal Kombat Art Tribute

Mortal Kombat

MK II

MK 3

MK 4

MKDA Standard

MKDA Alt.

MK Deception Standard

MK Deception Alt.

MK vs DC

MK9 Standard

MK9 Alt.