Ripping off your opponent’s head and urinating down their bleeding throat hole probably wouldn’t be too palatable for today’s audiences. After all, Splatterhouse letting you beat up demon anuses was met with a certain degree of scorn in 2010. So, no, Primal Rage might not go over too well in 2020.
But don’t tell that to the fine folks over at NetherRealm, who recently included the game as a fun little easter egg in Mortal Kombat 11.
The Retrokade stage is a cavalcade of nerdy delights from yesteryear, with arcade cabinets scattered like they would’ve been in an old, dingy arcade. An eagle-eyed fan on Reddit took a closer look at the stage, and noticed a Primal Rage cabinet tucked away in the stage.
How was NetherRealm able to pull that off?
u/kayuza gives a pretty thorough explanation. “It’s in the Time Warner Interactive library of games - Time Warner bought a controlling interest in Atari Games in 1993, then in 1996 WMS Industries (Midway’s owners) bought that company.”
This, then, is very much Mortal Kombat referencing back to one of their most notorious knock-offs. For the babies in the room, Primal Rage was a brutal fighting game in which prehistoric animals beat the ever-loving hell out of each other in increasingly violent and absurd ways. Think Mortal Kombat meets Rampage, and you’re halfway there.
So, what does this mean? Probably nothing. They had access to an old IP and dusted it off as a cheeky little nod to the past. But that being said… if this is a tease for some sort of revival, there are few people who would be more down than me.
