Secret Mortal Kombat Menus Discovered 20 Years Later

Midway and Acclaim were known for having a ton of secrets in the games they released. Well, it turns out that the arcade machines for the first three Mortal Kombat games had a few more secrets than what people originally thought. Secret game menus that could access the dip switches without opening up the machines were recently discovered.

GameZone links to a video from YouTuber psyco96 who does a quick test of the secret menus stashed in the arcade machines. You can check out the video below.

According to the GameZone article, Ed Boon, who is one half of Mortal Kombat's creators, named the menus after his initials.

You can access the EJB menu by pushing the block button on 1P and 2P during the attract screen in the following sequence: 1P (5X), 2P (10X), 1P (3X), 2P (1X), 1P (2X), 2P (2X), 1P (3X), 2P (4X)

This will take you to the EJB Menu, which is little more than a dip switch menu for the arcade machines, only you don't have to open up the machine and hit the switch to access the menu. What does the EJB Menu do? Well, you can do pretty much anything you could from the dip switch menus for most arcade games, including run diagnostics, test the CPU board, change how much it costs to play the game, the difficulty settings and lots of other cool things.

For gamers who regularly play old ROMs on MAME, this menu is absolutely nothing new. In fact, to run a lot of the older titles that are no longer in circulation that use specialized controllers, it's mandatory to go into the dip switch and modify the controls, the player setup and other small things of that sort. The only thing I'm shocked about is that for as long as the first three Mortal Kombat games have been up and out on the arcade emulation scene I can't believe that the EJB Menu is just now becoming news.

Then again, most people playing via emulation likely didn't bother with finding the EJB Menu because arcade emulators like MAME make it easy to get into the diagnostic screens and modify the game and system settings on the fly.

The EJB Menu for Mortal Kombat 3 will allow players to check out gameplay demos, Fatalities and other hidden secrets.

So far this kind of cheat content has not been discovered in NetherRealm Studios' latest Mortal Kombat X, but it does make me wonder if they considered adding it to the game? These days a lot of titles rely on DLC for cheat codes, like Saints Row. So hidden menus and cheat features are things rarely seen these days in gaming, but I wouldn't put it past Ed Boon to have some sort of tucked away secret in Mortal Kombat X. Maybe just like with the original trilogy, we'll find out about some other secret menu 20 years from now.