able to reform his brother and fight alongside him once again. Other games Sub-Zero has also featured as a guest/cameo character in three non-fighting Midway Games titles: NBA Jam Tournament Edition (1995), The Grid (2000), and MLB Slugfest: Loaded (2004). Sub-Zero makes a cameo appearance in Injustice: Gods Among Us (2013) during Scorpion's intro, in which the latter is about to perform a fatality on the former before being mysteriously pulled into the Injustice universe. In the indie-game Punch Club, a ninja named Sub-273 serves as the game's final boss, with his character design based on the first Mortal Kombat film; the "-273" being a reference to the Celsius representation of 0 kelvin, which is considered absolute zero. Sub-Zero appears as a playable character alongside Raiden via downloadable content in the game's sequel, Injustice 2 (2017). Despite making references to Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, Sub-Zero's ending suggests he was also mysteriously pulled to the Injustice universe during the near-end events of Mortal Kombat X. In his arcade ending, following his victory over the alien Brainiac, Sub-Zero worked with Batman to find a way back to his universe. In the meantime, the former became a teacher to the latter's younger allies, while waiting for the gate to his home Mortal Kombat universe prepared. After the tyrannical Superman is accidentally freed from the Phantom Zone when the gate to Mortal Kombat dimension gone awry however, a duty-bound Sub-Zero chooses to stay for as long as he needs to so he can assist the Justice League in re-imprisoning him. Character design and gameplay Sub-Zero has Ice powers and was first conceived by Mortal Kombat co-creator John Tobias as a mysterious character named simply "Ninja". According to Richard Divizio, the Lin Kuei idea was his input back at the very beginning of the development, in the project that had been cancelled by Midway Games before being restarted later, and in which "originally John [Tobias] had Japanese ninjas". Tobias wrote this inspiration came from the controversial book China's Ninja Connection by Li Hsing, which "posits historical evidence for the existence of the Lin Kuei and their influence on the Japanese ninja. I was aware of there being some controversy about the author’s claims. So when we split the character in two for palette swaps, I thought it would be fitting that one was of Chinese origin and the other Japanese to kind of embody