Over the past 30 years, we’ve seen over a dozen Mortal Kombat characters in some variation of a ninja mask to cover up their faces so that we only really see their eyes and maybe some forehead.
Tremor recently returned to Mortal Kombat 1 as its first DLC Kameo fighter, and there seems to be a good reason he’s wearing the mask in the full game.
Thanks to a mod from SHAAR, we can now see what lies beneath his badass and stony exterior with RainyJady sharing some up close shots of the rocky ninja.
In these images, it’s easy to see that Tremor’s got a relatively normal face model with the cracked rock texture on top of it making it almost look like he’s made out of wood or something.
The most interesting part, however, is that this texture only travels as far back as the beginning of his ear models and top of his head with the rest being a pretty generic, pale human head.
Unmasked/Hoodless Tremor pic.twitter.com/AlQDIobwhm
— Trey (@RainyJady) November 29, 2023
As pointed out by someone else in the comments, we could see Tremor’s full face in Mortal Kombat X, and he certainly didn’t look like that.
Although it’s maybe not as common as it once was for limitation reasons, this practice is still found all over video games as something of a visual illusion to players though not quite that far.
It’s just much easier and faster to fully model and detail what the player will never see during regular gameplay, and that’s not a bad thing.
We still see it (or technically don’t) all the time in environments and especially in fighting game stages where things are mostly viewed from a 2D perspective.
Liu what did you do oml pic.twitter.com/N9rHNRKIyU
— Cass (@CassidyEX3) November 29, 2023
What this does tell us, however, is that we probably won’t be seeing any sort of skins or cosmetic options for Tremor that removes his mask because his full face isn’t meant to be shown off.
There was another even more interesting discovery made within Mortal Kombat 1’s files recently when data-miners uncovered Omni-Man has an apparently scrapped mechanic where he could use his own Kameo as a meat shield and lose them for the rest of the match.
If you want to know our full thoughts on Tremor’s addition to the game as an assist with quite a bit of depth, then check out our review for him too.