Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition Reference Cards

In 2011, when NetherRealm Studios released the Mortal Kombat “reboot” game (also known as Mortal Kombat 9 due to being the 9th game in the canon), Prima Games published an “Official Game Guide” (really more of a quite beautiful art book with move lists and some tips) . It was offered in two editions – the standard paperback, and a “Kollector’s Edition” hardcover; the latter including additional content, among which were laminated reference cards, showing moves, combos and finishers for all characters.

At one point, Prima offered a downloadable PDF of the reference cards on their website. This was in response to serious errors and omissions discovered in the original edition of the guide, which made many buyers unhappy; Prima quickly fixed the problems and offered the downloadable PDF as an alternative to reprinting the guide. Later, the PDF was removed, and Prima would instead offer to mail the printed cards directly to the original buyers. Eventually, the full guide did receive a second printing, with the corrected information (at least the paperback version did).

As common nowadays, after the game’s original release, NetherRealm Studios offered extra downloadable content (DLC), including 4 completely new characters – Skarlet, Rain, Kenshi and Freddy Krueger. Eventually, all of the DLCs were incorporated in an updated version, known as Mortal Kombat Komplele Edition (released in 2012 for the consoles and in 2013 for the PC). By that time, the interest in the game has been, naturally, on the decline, so Prima never released a version of the guide (or the cards) with information for the new characters (neither did any other book publisher, to the best of my knowledge).

At that point, some players had already made their own (often better) versions of printable reference cards. However, the ones by Prima did look especially nice. So I got the idea to make cards for the DLCs based on the original PDF distributed by Prima, of which I obtained a copy before it disappeared.

Using Adobe Acrobat, I created new pages, cut and pasted graphical elements from existing pages, edited the text to show the names, bios and moves for the DLC characters, and amended them with matching pictures obtained at various web resources, such as Mortal Kombat Warehouse and the Mortal Kombat Wiki.

The result, in my opinion, looked quite nice, despite a few limitations – I did not include the beautiful, unique background pictures for each warrior (since I could not think of what background to use or where to find source material), and instead just used solid dark red background. Also, the original fonts in the PDF were not available to me, but there were some that were close enough.

As an extra bonus, I also created a Fatality reference card, like the ones that were attached to the beginning of the guide (yes, the PDF included them as well). Since there are 7 entries per page of the Fatality cards, and only four DLCs, I added the finishers for the boss characters (Goro, Kintaro, Shao Kahn), for whom modders had long found hacks to make them playable, and discovered all their moves as well.

To me this was just a fun project, mostly to see if it can be done, and to satisfy a sense of “completion”. I hope that now, more than 7 years after the game’s release, no one will mind if I share my custom-made cards, and some players might find value in them, so I offer them for download:

MK:KE – DLC Character Reference Cards

MK:KE – DLC Character Reference Cards (double pages)
(the double page version has the pages reordered for printing two cards per sheet, double-sided, and then cutting them along the middle)

MK:KE – DLC / Bosses Fatality Cards

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