The Best Prince Tribute of All: Mortal Kombat’s Rain

  What the hell’s been happening to the celebtastic of the world lately? There are more rich people biting the bullet than during the goddamn French Revolution. You can’t hit Facebook without ‘RIP to a legend’ being plastered all over your browser window. A couple days back, I saw Jack Nicholson trending and almost lost bowel control before I saw it was just his 79th birthday.  

Do you see how paranoid you’re making us, 2016? DO YOU?

Musical maestro Prince, who was formerly known as Prince and is now once again known as Prince, is one of the world’s latest sad losses. Tributes and such are still ongoing around the world. His music’s enjoying a resurgence, as is always the case with these situations, and damn right too. For some years, though, Mortal Kombat has already been celebrating the singer’s life.

Remember Rain, who debuted in Mortal Kombat Ultimate 3? The purple-clad ninja was an homage to the musician, and with each new game he appeared in, looked a little more like him. Here, courtesy of Kotaku, is MK creator Ed Boon on the origins of the character:

'Rain was me being a jerk, basically. [laughs] When we were working on Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, I was thinking “what ninja color have we not done yet?” … and I’m a huge Prince fan, so I was thinking Purple Rain. I was probably still listening to the album. There was no time to actually make a character, because the game was done. So I hacked into the attract screen a quick little sequence of this purple ninja running at Shao Kahn. We didn’t even have the word “Rain” in the powerbar, so I manually built it using our font. So I included this quick glimpse just to drive people crazy. Once Mortal Kombat Trilogy came out, we gave Rain new moves and he finally became a real character. Later we brought him back forMortal Kombat Armageddon. That’s one of the things about Mortal Kombat: many of the characters have these goofy development histories. Noob Saibot, Reptile…all of these odd origin stories.'

For more on Rain, take an ogle below.