This summer’s been a pretty great one for fighting game fans, with Street Fighter 6 having released to an overwhelmingly positive reception back in June and Mortal Kombat 1 now having arrived in early access form.
No matter whether you’ve already jumped into MK1 or are waiting until September 19, odds are you’ve been checking out all of the trailers and impressions that’ve been dropping over the past couple of weeks, as well as planning out your battle strategies in advance.
While a sizeable portion of those who’ve played the game so far have been busy moaning that Megan Fox’s voice acting sounds a bit flat, dataminers and modders have been hard at work digging into the game’s files, with one having potentially stumbled across evidence of an unused game mode.
Do you think Mortal Kombat 1 needs an MK9-style tag mode?
According to modder Ermaccer, who has recently released an unofficial 60 FPS patch for MK1, the game includes a Mortal Kombat 9-esque tag team mode that’s “currently unused/not finished.”
“I've managed to find a method to use normal characters instead of Kameos - and it turns out when that's done a dedicated MK9-like tag mode kicks in,” they wrote in the description of a YouTube video they’ve put together about the mode.
After swapping a regular character in for their Kameo fighter via modding techniques, they were able to use the button that’s usually assigned to Kameo fighters as the input to swap the members of their impromptu tag team in and out of fights at any time.
This looks to allow for some pretty cool combo sequences that make use of an updated movelist, though Ermaccer reports that the mode’s current form doesn’t include any fatal blows, throws or breakers.
Likely to help balance this out, both members of the team are given lower health than their solo base game counterparts, facilitating knockouts that can take one member of a team out of the action before a fight is done, leaving their partner to soldier on alone.
That said, Ermaccer looks to have managed to time some moves up so that the character executing them stayed in play after tagging out.
“There’s currently no ‘normal’ way to access this mode,” the modder reveals at the end of the video, “but considering it has some dedicated code, it might appear in an update or DLC.”
Regardless of whether you’re hoping to be able to enjoy a bit of MK9-style tag action in Mortal Kombat 1 at some point down the line, make sure to follow us for a bunch of helpful guides that’ll aid you in your quest to get to grips with it.