'Mortal Kombat 12' Potentially Leaked By NetherRealm Employee

It’s no surprise that the makers of a successful video game will often want to make more of it, to make more money, and enjoy further success. One franchise that’s long been pushing out games to fulfil the appetite of its fans is Mortal Kombat. Since the release of the original Mortal Kombat in arcades in 1992 - read all about that, right here - the series has spat out one-on-one- fighter after one-on-one fighter, as well as several spin-off games, TV shows and movies (the most recent of which came out in 2021, and already has a sequel in the works). And now it seems that the twelfth main instalment of the bloody fighting game is due for a reveal.

As posted to Reddit, it seems that a developer at Mortal Kombat makers NetherRealm accidentally tweeted an image which included evidence that Mortal Kombat 12 - the follow-up to 2019’s well-received MK11 - is in production. Jonathan Andersen, a producer at NetherRealm, posted a photo of a desk covered in Mortal Kombat imagery - but on one of the screens in the shot is a folder marked ‘MK12_Mast’. Whatever could it be?

We played Guess the Fatality with two of the stars of 2021’s Mortal Kombat movie - check out the video below.

As SegmentNext reports, this file was on a screen directly below a message, from an employee named Christine (possibly NetherRealm production manager Christine Letheby), asking staff to be careful with confidential information about the next Mortal Kombat game. In the photo you can clearly see how she warns that fans will “eagerly scrape the internet” for any information. Whoops.

Naturally, some are saying that this photo is too juicy to be an accident. Just too perfect. An email warning against revealing information, right next to a folder that does just that? And all the classic imagery from the Mortal Kombat series - perhaps suggesting which characters could feature in the next game? There’s even a Reptile file on show, too. While Andersen’s tweet was deleted, the photo remains available to view - surely NetherRealm and publishers Warner Bros. would have found some way to get that offline, if this really was an undesired, unintended leak. And yet, here we are.

“This is 100% intentional,” comments one Reddit user. “It’s all incredibly orchestrated,” says another, noting discrepancies between the weather information in the photo and the actual weather on the date it was supposedly taken. “This was done on purpose,” writes another user and yeah, the more you look at this thing, the more it seems deliberate. 

So, Mortal Kombat 12 reveal, real soon? Seems so.

Topics: Mortal Kombat, Warner Bros