Mortal Kombat II (SNES)

Can you play as a boss character?

For many years, it was rumoured that you could play as the bosses in Mortal Kombat II, so I decided to try to find out for real. The theory goes that if a character is playable, we should be able to force the game to start us as that character if we locate the value that the character select screen uses to tell the game which character we chose.

It turns out that this does indeed work - sort of. The boss characters are members of the same table as the playable ones. However what they seem to lack is any sort of code to allow a player to handle them. Certain moves do work, but even if you're extremely careful, it's only a matter time before something breaks and a crash is caused.

What about hidden stages?

This was a bit more difficult to track down, but I also managed to locate where the current stage number is stored in RAM. This does allow you to play on stages like Goro's Lair, but no other valid stages seem to exist. A couple sort of work, and I think these are things like the Game Over screen and maybe the ending screen. They tend to freeze the game however music continues to play, and often you can see a partial background.

The codes

The following codes work on the USA (NTSC) Revision 1 version. They may work on other versions. As this is purely experimental and should only really be performed in an emulator, only Pro Action Replay codes are included.

Play as any character:

Enter the code 7E2EF8 for player 1, or 7E30A6 for player 2, followed by the two digit code below to choose the character for that player.

Play on any stage:

Enter the code 7E3270 followed by the code below to choose the stage. If you change a stage while already on a stage, odd things can happen in some cases. I've guessed at what I think the last few stages might be.