thebobmaster said:
Raiden was based off of the character "Lightning" from Big Trouble in Little China .
His appearance maybe, his name is the Japanese god of thunder he has red skin and a demonic face, his feet have two claws on them, and he carries either a wheel or drums on his back. He also is thought to eat human navels so people are advised to lie on their stomachs during storms.
'Kintaro' was originally intended to be a humanoid tiger, similar to the creature in Japanese mythology. This idea was scrapped, however, due to the fact that creating the costume would not have been feasible. However, thanks to this original idea, the Shokan we know as Kintaro has the tiger stripes on his back.
'Jax' was originally supposed to be in the original "Mortal Kombat" game and named Kurtis Stryker. Jax was then moved to MKII and the Stryker character debuted in "Mortal Kombat 3".
The story of Stryker : Originally, the character Kurtis Stryker was supposed to appear in MK1, but was scrapped early in the development process when beta tests revealed a player interest in a female character in the game, which led to Sonya replacing Stryker. In MK2, Kurtis Stryker almost made it to the final game, but finally had his name changed to... Jax. For MK3, a new Kurtis Stryker is created and is finally made part of a MK game.
'Sektor' and 'Cyrax' before given their names were called 'ketchup' and 'mustard'.
Kitana was originally planned to be in Mortal Kombat 4. However, her color palette was changed to brown to make Tanya.
Noob Saibot was originally going to be in the arcade version of Mortal Kombat 4. He made an appearance in a few of the earlier versions of the game.
Unfortunately the game needed more new characters and so in beta version 5 (Release : September 2nd, 1997) Noob Saibot's place on the character select screen was taken by the Kano-like character Jarek. And so Noob Saibot skipped the first official release (known as Revision 1) of the game.
Noob Saibot also made an appearance in the first beta version (Released : September 26th, 1997) of the second official release of the game. In the second beta version, his place was taken by the newcomer, Reiko. This is unfortunately the last appearance of Noob Saibot in the arcade version of Mortal Kombat 4.
Like Kitana and Noob Saibot, Kano was also planned for MK4, however, due to there not being enough new characters in the game, they left Kano out of the roster and put Jarek instead of him.
Jarek directly had Kano's signature moves and fatalities, which caused a lot of complaints from fans simply born by the fact that there was nothing original in Jarek.