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Johnny Cage can never die
24.09.2023 - 15:31 / polygon.com / Luke Skywalker / Bruce Lee
Johnny Cage has been kind of a big deal for Mortal Kombat from the beginning. Scorpion and Sub-Zero may be the faces of the franchise, and Liu Kang its hero, but Johnny is critical to Mortal Kombat’s genesis.
He was the very first character that series co-creators Ed Boon and John Tobias filmed for 1992’s Mortal Kombat. Part stand-in for and part homage to Jean-Claude Van Damme — Johnny’s original look is ripped from the actor’s costume from Bloodsport — Cage was the closest thing MK would have to an everyman.
“Johnny Cage represented the audience’s perspective on what it would be like to be introduced to this crazy supernatural tournament called Mortal Kombat,” Boon recently told me.
Cage is also core to the creation of one of Mortal Kombat’s defining features: the Fatality.
And even after two franchise reboots, canonically dying (at least twice), and a whole-cloth timeline reset in Mortal Kombat 1, Johnny Cage is still that guy: a lovable asshole, a cocksure Hollywood martial artist who is strangely relatable, and the primary source of comic relief in a game series famous for its blood-spurting decapitations and disemboweling finishing moves.
Johnny Cage isn’t even his real name. In Mortal Kombat fiction, the Hollywood actor was born John Carlton. Cage is just his stage name; but when Boon and Tobias first conceived of Mortal Kombat’s cast of characters, he was known as Michael Grimm.
Mortal Kombat was famously born of a failed plan to build an arcade game around Jean-Claude Van Damme. The actor, then famous for his roles in Kickboxer, Double Impact, and Universal Soldier, rebuffed a pitch to be digitized by Midway Games for Van Damme: The Arcade Game. So Boon and Tobias, inspired by the popularity of Capcom’s Street Fighter 2, set out to make their own fighting game.
Tobias would define the archetypes for Mortal Kombat’s fighters. No. 1 on the list was the game’s hero, Liu Kang, inspired by martial arts actors Gordon Liu and Bruce Lee, according to Tobias. Just behind him, at No. 2, was Michael Grimm, envisioned as a “sidekick” to Liu Kang. Grimm’s first biography described him as “a martial arts superstar, trained throughout his life by great masters from around the world. He is the current box-office champ and star of such movies as ‘Dragon’s Fist,’ ‘Dragon’s Fist II,’ and the award winning ‘Sudden Violence.’”
Boon and Tobias hoped that Van Damme would play him. “We saw JCVD’s character as the Han Solo to Liu Kang’s Luke Skywalker,” Tobias said in a 2021 thread on X recalling the early days of Johnny Cage’s creation.
Even after Van Damme turned down the role, “Ed and I thought the character as a Hollywood star would still work in our game,” Tobias said. “We even kept my little pencil doodle that
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