Anyone assuming Conquest didn't have a strong cult following is almost certainly describing their own disinterest, or ignorance. There's a swath of fans who clearly never saw it, but good, bad, or indifferent, it played a big part in the post-MK4 culture. It was a real void filler smack dab in the middle of the uncertain lull between MK4 and MKDA. Crossover requests like these were a whole lot more common back then, into the early 2000s. Folks from the mk5.org days should certainly remember it.
The show was decent for what it was and absolutely had its fans. Not enough to demand bleeding into the games themselves, but the games
have had a knack for following some similar roads over the years. D'Vorah is the latest example. Convergent logics, as much as any deliberate reference.
Now that we're well and truly beyond the Threshold Entertainment era - it's questionable whether Conquest has any real contemporary relevance. No matter the year, Threshold's work rarely had any direct importance to the video games themselves.
We covered the licensed media rights issue on MKO, very recently. If for some reason you didn't understand why - Vorpax won't be the last active example.
For what it's worth, with the rerelease of the films etc, it seems more likely that WB has reached a rights agreement with Kasanoff. Can only speculate how far that goes. There's still no demand or reason to appropriate those characters into the games - cost or no cost. Skulking around Shang Tsung was a good dynamic for the show, but there hasn't been a lot of room for it in the games. D'Vorah fulfils the late-in-the-series twist far better.
Fans will be fans, though. If you dig Vorpax, we recently added her original FoMA stock card to the
user icon library (avatars). It was part of our
Federation of Martial Arts archive. It's a mugshot, so it's completely safe for work. You may never recover from watching FoMA, though.
