4. Rain – Mortal Kombat / Prince
Mortal Kombat has its fair share of interchangeable rainbow ninjas, but none are as cool as Rain. Born out of Ed Boon admittedly “being a jerk” he decided to throw a purple dude called Rain into the mix way back UMK 3. And look how far he’s come.
‘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 power bar, so I manually built it using our font. So I included this quick glimpse just to drive people crazy.’
Nowadays Rain looks a touch more fleshed out, with his story lines in the later games talking about his ‘celestial/royal’ lineage, and his garb looking more and more like Prince as the series continues. A great homage to the late, great artist.
