They probably didn't feel like making an animation for the spine rip.

Laziness was also the reason for excluding the Pit II fatality, when both could be easily done, for example, they should have had Sub-Zero just rip off the head with no spine and go into his winning pose holding it.

Yup, same thing with Kung Lao's slice, Jax's arm rip, and Johnny Cage's split punch. Too much trouble to make new animations for them, so instead of limiting the moves to work on MK II characters they just removed them completely.

And on PSX Trilogy, they took out Scorpion's beatdown fatality as well. I'm guessing it's because they would have had to keep the Hell stage loaded in memory at all times, and that would just be impractical. The alternative would be to add a lot of loading time for that one fatality. Instead they just took it out and gave him the flaming hand thing.

It's so sad since, literally, all they needed for the head rip was a spine. Just a spine. If they made it look like MK1, they could have done it in MS Paint in about 5 minutes.

Wow, I always thought that the Sub Zero's head rip had been removed because the cencors got squeemish and the developers decided that it should be removed.I was so disappointed when i saw that screen turn black for the first time, as at that time I had never played the first MK and was eager to see this much-vaunted fatality.

Sub-Zero's Spine Rip was to Violent for MKT, Ed boon Said it in a Old Enterview for UMK3.

Agreed. That's what they did in the N64 version for Motaro's fatality.



Ka-Tra

I think everything would have been fine if they had just hacked in every fatality they could, you know? Have kintaro do a teleport that splatted them like Sektor's squishy. Make human smoke uppercut them off the top of the screen, then charge another uppercut and uppercut through their torso when they came down again. There is practically an infinite number of things they could have done without adding new frames.