Lots of questions about both #Kitana and #Mileena. 

They go together like peanut butter & jelly. #MortalKombat is the bread that holds them together...

Here’s a long deconstructive history on #MortalKombat ’s most soap-operatic twinsies... (thread) https://twitter.com/joshuaxxmanuel/status/1383822792450207744

Kitana/Mileena were first conceived way back at the beginning of MK1’s development as a character doodle named Kitsune. She was meant to be an unplayable character and the princess daughter of Shang Lao (later Tsung)... (1/17)

The idea was that if you won the game as the hero, Kitsune would turn against her father and be rewarded to the hero as a prize. Or something like that. It never got further than that idea and the forgotten doodle... (2/17)

Later, when we began work on MK2, Kitsune was one of the first characters I sketched. It was a B&W drawing. I gave her sais instead of a fan and I covered her face in a veil... (3/17)

Veil myths vary depending on culture. But, while doing story research I discovered that a veil could imply regality or high status. It could imply illusion and deception. It could imply subjugation. All are powerful implications represented by a simple veil (4/17)

Ed saw the B&W sketch of the veiled, sai wielding female fighter and thought we should palette swap her to get an additional character, like Scorpion and Sub-Zero... (5/17)

That triggered thoughts about twin sisters hidden behind veils and all of the archetypal implications it would bring. We used those ideas to weave their stories with an imperialistic other-place called Outworld ruled by their cruel father-emperor (6/17)

We renamed Kitsune 2 Kitana, an amalgam of Kitsune and KAtana. Kitsune was a fox woman from Japanese mythology and a katana is of course a Japanese sword. Kitana was more ambiguous and implied the beauty of a fox w the danger of a sword... (7/17)

We called her sister Mileena. I don’t recall the inspiration other than it had a pleasant sound to it, which either helped hide her grotesque appearance or exposed a hidden inner beauty depending on your POV. Also it was better than Jabber Jaws (8/17)

We sorted out their colors and weapons (fans/sais) and Kitana and Mileena’s fiction snowballed from there. Key to their characterizations were the conflicts of sibling rivalry and rebelling against authority... (9/17)

The beautiful Kitana, born of royalty, discovered secret truths behind her mother’s death and her father’s rule that fueled her rebellion... (10/17)

The hideous Mileena, born of sorcery, her appearance was used to manipulate her feelings toward her sister and caused her to curry favor with their father... (11/17)

We didn’t get a chance to explore their early history, but I imagine that Queen Sindel died when Kitana was very young and that Mileena was introduced as her sister around that same time (12/17)

You can imagine the psychological damage they would’ve both gone through...

The regality of princesses;

The deception of hidden motives;

A collapse into subjugation that eventually fuels a rebellion against authority... (13/17)

This deconstruction of Kitana/Mileena’s backstory is not material that we would’ve presented to the player... (14/17)

It was an under the surface foundation that future events were built upon. Like Kitana’s relationship w Liu and the return of Queen Sindel or the empathetic independence of Mileena as she broke out from her sister’s shadow not to mention their psychic connection (15/17)

So to answer the specific question about Mileena... we never knew that any character would resonate w players, we only hoped that they would.

In the early MK games, we didn’t map out a multi-game story arch in the beginning because we had never anticipated our sequels (16/17)

But back then, we knew that a solid foundation and setup would imply events in a larger world and trigger player imagination.

Despite the limitation of text strings and a few silly cutscenes (17/17)