Over the holidays, the source code for Mortal Kombat II was dumped on GitHub, giving fans and video game historians the chance to view unused artwork, animations, and moves that didn’t wind up in the finished game.
It was a perfect late Christmas gift for fighting game fans and video game historians, though it seems that Warner Brothers wasn't too appreciative of this information being widely available. At the end of last week, a representative for the company issued a DMCA takedown notice prompting GitHub to remove public access to the dump (as spotted by Kotaku and other publications).
In the notice, the representative stated the leak infringed upon the rights of "The Mortal Kombat series of video games, and all names, characters, logos, and original source code."
While the source code is no longer widely available in full, there is no shortage of fans who have reuploaded sprites and artwork from the game on Twitter and YouTube, in order to publicly document and comment on the newly-unearthed content. We won't be linking to that content (for obvious reasons) but will provide some context on what has been discovered.
Among various other things, it appears that fans were able to find a new attract mode screen for Shao Khan in the dumped files, depicting a bunch of previously unseen wizards standing on platforms in front of the Outworld portal. There were also unused moves including cut fatalities for Johnny Cage and Shao Khan and various animations for various other fighters. Cage's animation saw him rip the opponent's brain out, while Shao Khan's had him use a portal in the ground to crush his opponent.
We've reached out to Warner Bros. for a comment.