How I Wasted Most Of A Friend's Day With Mortal Kombat: Deception

For those familiar with my blog, it may be apparent that I have a certain propensity for pranks. My favorite target is usually my father, but plenty of dorm residents were on the receiving end back when I went to the University of Kansas. One of my favorite targets was a friend named Ryan, and he lived a couple rooms down from mine. He also happened to be a gamer, and was going through hell trying to figure out how to unlock Liu Kang in Mortal Kombat: Deception.

You see, back when Deception came out, many of its secrets weren't discovered immediately. Ed Boon has always been a fan of hiding content deep within the game that can only be unlocked after super-specific criteria were met. Even in the internet era, he's been successful at keeping fans guessing for quite a while after a game's release. Unsurprisingly, Liu Kang was one of the most desired unlockables in Deception, and no one seemed to know how to unlock him.

Most secrets were unlocked through the huge Konquest mode. It wasn't a particularly exciting mode, and primarily consisted of running around gigantic, sparsely-populated areas and opening chests. Every once in a while you'd run into someone who wanted to fight, at which point it would go into a standard MK bout.

Ryan had been posting on message boards for a few days trying to find Liu, and nothing he tried was working. I owed him for a prank he had pulled on me, so took it upon myself to make a fake account on the board he was posting on. I responded to his plea for help by listing the following criteria to unlock Liu Kang:

• Find Scorpion and beat him three times on the hardest difficulty, without getting hit once
• Run around the perimeter of Chaosrealm three times, making sure to hug the perimeter the entire time (straying from the edge of the map for even a second would void the attempt and you'd have to start over at the Scorpion fight)
• Find Tanya and beat her three times on the hardest difficulty without getting hit, and use only the low kick button

This is ridiculously hard for numerous reasons. It's really difficult to beat Scorpion or Tanya even once without getting hit, much less three times in a row (and in Tanya's case, using only one button). Also, the Chaosrealm map took forever to get around.

To back up my post, I created a couple other fake accounts and posted confirmations of the Liu Kang "solution." Apparently Ryan didn't realize that all of these accounts had zero posts, and he decided to take on the nearly impossible task.

For the next several hours, I heard screaming and a string of profanities emanating from his dorm room. I'd drop by every once in a while, and he'd usually be restarting the process after getting hit by Scorpion. Eventually, he got the pattern down and could consistently beat Scorpion, but would often restart after accidentally straying from the wall or getting his path blocked while running around Chaosrealm. Each time he restarted, he'd erupt in profanities and I'd have to leave the room to keep myself from laughing.

This continued for a downright stupid amount of time. After he had spent the majority of the day attempting this, he finally got to the second of three Tanya fights. She immediately hit him with a move, and he looked utterly defeated. Even though this prank was in retaliation for one he had pulled on me (which I don't specifically recall at the moment), I couldn't let it continue any longer. I logged onto the fake message board account from my room, and edited the post to read "You're an idiot. Signed, Dan."

When I returned to his room, he was starting the process again. I told him to refresh the message board post to see if there were any new replies. When he read the post, I think it took everything he had to not tackle me through the dorm window. Drinking copious amounts of alcohol is a way of life in college, but I think he required a couple extra beers that night to erase the memories of wandering Chaosrealm for hours on end.

Have any game prank stories? Share them in the comments or reply on Twitter if you do.