at them discovering how Ed Boon gets crazy about leaks, people forgot his editorial he sent to tons of gamepro (or was it egm? back in 1996 about how The Internet was killing arcade business revenues and MK3 at the time, and all those other stories of him freaking out about the leak of the Smoke unlock code for umk3. I need to find the scans for this..
unfortunately it's neither of those magazines (unless it might be
EGM2) at least in the letters sections from the release of MK3 in the arcades until the end of 1996, if you have another magazine in mind I'll be happy to check for it unless it's one I don't have access to the period for (I can just from my memory rule out this being in
Game Informer,
Next Generation or
Edge)
I do know that both Boon and Tobias gave similar negative comments about it for years in interviews, even as late as the immortal
Mortal Kombat: Special Forces I recall them expressing an unhappiness with the change in not only the business side of arcades dying but also how there was no longer a "shared experience" between arcade players because of the internet making the shared experience immediate and international, and this had not only altered their approach to MK4 but also then once Boon got around to leading the first "reboot" with Deadly Alliance.
Boon claimed for pretty much two decades there was stuff that had never been found in MK1-3, and it turned out he wasn't lying:
https://testyourmight.com/threads/mk1-mk2-mk3-secret-ejb-hidden-menu-codes-discovered-after-20-years.58801/