Highlights

  • Mortal Kombat 1's upcoming DLC character Ermac is an undead warrior with ties to King Jerrod, with a full gameplay trailer teased by Ed Boon.
  • Ed Boon revealed Ermac's origins traced back to hidden coding errors dubbed "Ermacs," leading to his evolution as a red ninja palette swap.
  • Players can look forward to Ermac's full release as a DLC character this spring, adding to Mortal Kombat 1's already packed roster of fighters.

Mortal Kombat 1 director Ed Boon recently teased a big reveal for later this week, namely a look at the upcoming DLC character Ermac. Mortal Kombat 1’s roster is already jam-packed with revamped versions of some of the franchise’s most noted fighters, and NetherRealm has been adding even more to its latest fighting title post-launch. So far, players have been able to step into the arena as returning Mortal Kombat 1 fighter Quan Chi alongside special guests like Peacemaker and Omni-Man from the hit Invincible animated series.

The next playable character set to arrive in Mortal Kombat 1 as part of the game’s Kombat Pack 1 DLC is Ermac, an undead, ninja-like warrior who made his debut as an unlockable character in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 way back in 1995. In Mortal Kombat 1, Ermac is an amalgamation of the souls of the Living Forest, created by Quan Chi to serve as a minion to both himself and Shang Tsung. It is eventually revealed that King Jerrod, husband of Sindel and father to Kitana and Mileena, is one of the many spirits within Ermac, and he soon helps the heroes fend off his former masters.

Mortal Kombat 1 Homelander Floating
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Ermac only appeared in a handful of battles in the base Mortal Kombat 1’s story campaign, but soon he will be fully playable as a DLC character. Ed Boon, co-creator of the Mortal Kombat series and co-director at NetherRelam Studios, teased a full gameplay trailer for Ermac later this week in a recent Twitter post. As a preview of what’s to come, this post includes a pre-fight face-off between Ermac and Kung Lao, during which the undead warrior humorously revealed that one of his souls was in a relationship with Madam Bo, much to Kung Lao’s apprehension.

Mortal Kombat 1 Ermac Gameplay Trailer is Coming This Week

Ed Boon shared plenty of his own secrets in his Twitter post, where he described how Ermac was eventually added to the Mortal Kombat universe. During the development of the original Mortal Kombat, Boon kept track of the programming errors encountered by marking them as “Error Macros,” or “Ermacs” for short. These “Ermacs” were tallied after the number of times that players encountered original Mortal Kombat hidden character Reptile in the game’s diagnostics menu, leading eagle-eyed players to believe that there was yet another secret opponent named Ermac.

This in turn would eventually lead to the official debut of Ermac in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 as a red-colored ninja palette swap of Scorpion and Sub-Zero that soon evolved into his own character across multiple games and timelines. His current incarnation in Mortal Kombat 1 is one of the most interesting to date, and it won’t be long before eager players can see him in action ahead of his full release as a DLC character sometime this spring.