10 Mortal Kombat Rip-Offs You Won't Believe Got Made

10. Thea Realm Fighters - High Voltage Software (1996)

In what can only be described as bad-game overkill, the Atari Jaguar nearly received a third terrible Mortal Kombat clone in 1996 in Thea Realm Fighters.

Thankfully the plug on this one was pulled literally at the zero hour, with the game having been nearly completed no less. Waning interest in both the console and the genre were the culprits.

So what was Thea Realm Fighters?

It looked a lot like Mortal Kombat 3, featured more than twenty-five playable characters, each one with four special moves and two finisher moves, and boasted a tournament mode which culminated in a match with SurRaider, a powerful warrior from another dimension. In short, Mortal Klonebat at its finest.

Because merely emulating MK wasn't quite enough to drive home the point, High Voltage even managed to hire Philip Ahn (Shang Tsung in MK 2) and Katalin Zamiar (Jade, Kitana, and Mileena) to appear on the Thea Realm Fighters roster.

In the end, though, all the Mortal Kombat flattery in the world couldn't prevent this title from being scrapped and perhaps the world is a better place for it.

Authored by Jason Russell

Contributor

Jason Russell has been working in video game journalism since the early 1990s before the internet existed, the term "fanzine" had meaning and sailors still debated as to whether or not the earth was flat. The first time. More recently he has been the guy responsible for the Retrospective column for Old School Gamer Magazine, pens up a Game Skinny column on a plethora of video game topics. He's somehow managed to author nine novels, writes and runs the blog CG Movie Review, is co-founder of the science fiction publishing house Starry Eyed Press, and sometimes, when the planets align and the caffeine has fully left his system, it's rumored he sleeps.

First Posted On: 27th Nov 2021

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