Daniel Pesina
Daniel Pesina (born 1959 in Chicago, Illinois) is a martial arts expert and a former employee of Midway. He is most recognized as the actor who played Johnny Cage and ninjas Sub-Zero, Scorpion, Reptile, Smoke, and Noob Saibot in Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat II.
Pesina was fired from Midway in 1994 for wearing Cage's costume in an advertisement for the Strata arcade game, BloodStorm, which turned out to be an emphatic flop among fighting game fans. The ad first appeared in the debut issue of the defunct Electronic Gaming Monthly spinoff magazine EGM2.
After his departure from Midway, further ventures into other fighting games proved unsuccessful. After the failure of BloodStorm, he and his brother Carlos (Raiden in the 2D Mortal Kombat games) assisted Data East with its digitized MK clone, Tattoo Assassins, which, despite an extensive feature in a summer '94 issue of EGM, never made it to arcades. In 1995, he and fellow MK actors Ho Sung Pak, Katalin Zamiar, and Dr. Phillip Ahn, M.D. all appeared in a fighting game produced exclusively for the Atari Jaguar titled Thea Realm Fighters, but it was never released after Atari ceased production on the failed system later that year.
Pesina appeared as one of Shredder's foot soldiers in the 1992 movie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze. In the 2003 martial arts movie The Book of Swords, which also starred fellow MK actors Zamiar, Pak and Richard Divizio, he played a hitman whose task was to take out the movie's leading man.
The brothers Pesina will also be appearing in a videogame-based comedy film entitled Press Start, which is due out in 2007. Daniel's character is called Sasori, which is Japanese for "scorpion."
As of 2004, Dan Pesina is a teacher at the Chicago Wushuguan School, while Carlos has been employed at Midway since 1995.