Mortal Kombat 1 has a beloved new character: Johnny Cage’s Roomba

Mortal Kombat 1 has a beloved new character: Johnny Cage’s Roomba

Time Stamp: June 30, 2023 6:05 PM
Source Node: 2153625

Mortal Kombat 1 promises deep cuts and fan service when it launches in September. The soft reboot of NetherRealm’s fighting game franchise will bring back classic versions of Sonya, Jax, and Kano, alongside reimagined versions of Sub-Zero, Scorpion, Raiden, and Liu Kang. They even put Stryker in this one! But one of the better low-key additions to MK1 is a robot making its first appearance in the 30-year-old franchise: Johnny Cage’s Roomba.

Fans who played NetherRealm’s Mortal Kombat 1 stress test last week discovered a few new details about the Roomba — which is almost assuredly not an official iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaner — including that it will actually try to clean up the blood splattered across Johnny Cage’s nice marble floors.

Johnny’s robot vacuum behaves just like a real-world cleaner robot, bumping into objects and reorienting itself as part of its bloodlust for busting dust. It’s the kind of thing that some programmer at NetherRealm spent way too much time on, probably — and it makes for a nice little touch in Mortal Kombat 1’s highly detailed stages.

And yes, if Roomba gets too close, you can kick it.

Like everything in the Mortal Kombat universe, Roomba can also die a gruesome death. Here’s the vacuum dying by accidentally falling into Cage’s in-house pool. The video below is so far the closest confirmation we have of Hara-Kiri moves, a finisher introduced in Mortal Kombat: Deception, returning to Mortal Kombat.

[Warning: The following video contains graphic content of a vacuum exploding.]

Johnny’s Roomba may need a firmware update ahead of Mortal Kombat 1’s launch, however. As seen in the video below, after Kenshi bisects Kitana into two sides of beef, Roomba tries to clean up the sloppy mess, only to become overwhelmed and attempt to fly back to its home planet.

The extent of Roomba’s abilities will only become clear when Mortal Kombat 1 launches on Sept. 19, on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.

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