Secret hidden easter eggs found in 20-year-old Mortal Kombat arcade cabinets

Players have to memorise a long and complex to code to access the menus

Kitana takes on Reptile in 1995's Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3

In October last year, hidden features and secret menus were discovered inside Mortal Kombat game cabinets, more than 20 years after some of the games had come out.

Now, footage of these menus has been posted on YouTube by Your MK Arcade Source, revealing shortcuts to character screens, hidden credits, and even an entirely different game buried in the depths of the machine.

To access these secrets, players must tap the block buttons in a long and difficult pattern. The combination has to be entered quickly and accurately, and sometimes it doesn't seem to work at all - explaining why these secrets have gone undiscovered for so long.

The menus shown in the video are in the original four Mortal Kombat arcade games, and can let lucky players manually change the initials on the game's leaderboard, watch each character's ending story and fatalities, unlock all hidden characters and even play a Galaga-style shooter game (although it looks pretty difficult).

Even though these cabinets may be decades old, they continue to reveal strange little Easter Eggs like these. Spending hours tapping old arcade cabinet buttons has never been so fun.

Pic: Ulimate Mortal Kombat by Peter-Ashley Jackson via Flickr. Published under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.