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

2. Way Of The Warrior - Universal Interactive Studios (1994)

mortal kombat ripoff
Naughty Dog

That the company behind such industry staples as Crash Bandicoot, The Last of Us and Uncharted began console development with a notoriously bad Mortal Kombat clone for 3DO is proof that ours is a very forgiving industry. Or maybe just a very forgetful one.

In any event, Way of the Warrior boasts the distinction of being the most popular MK clone on the 3DO platform, and we're not entirely sure this is a good thing.

The game really doesn't bother with much of a story, instead explaining that players must use one of The World Warriors (guess Capcom's lawyers missed that part) in a fight to the death in order to be sealed into "The Book of Warriors".

Surprisingly, the visuals and moves weren't criticized by journalists at the time. The same could not be said for the controls, though. Still, it proved successful enough to where an arcade port was being developed in the exact opposite order of how things usually go with fighting games.

Way of the Warrior came and went without much fanfare but when a then-bankrupt Naughty Dog showed their apartment-made project to Mark Cerny (yes, THAT Mark Cerny), he was impressed enough to sign the developers up to do three more games for Universal Interactive.

Do you know what those would become? Crash Bandicoot, Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back and Crash Bandicoot: Warped.

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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.