Liu Kang, Fei Long and Marshall Law are all... Bruce Lee
When Bruce Lee died under mysterious circumstances way back in 1973, it didn't take long before lookalikes started lining up to cash in on his legacy. Sporting names like Bruce Le, Bruce Li, Bruce Lai and Bruce Liang, these ripoff artists started churning out derivative kung fu films before Lee's body was even cold. Granted, it didn't take much to convincingly imitate the icon: all you needed were sharp Asian features, a black mop-top, a ripped, shirtless physique and the ability to howl in a falsetto. So it's really not surprising that the videogame industry would go and do the same thing several times over.
Mortal Kombat's Liu Kang was arguably the first major game character to really imitate Lee well (although later MK games changed him just enough to keep him from being a clone). Not to be outdone, the Street Fighter series introduced their own Lee-alike, a Hong Kong actor named Fei Long who one-upped Kang's impersonation with blinding speed and Lee's weird, trademark vibrating-muscles pose. Finally, Lee-alikes entered the third dimension with Tekken's Marshall Law, who actually went so far as to wear Lee's iconic yellow jumpsuit (from the unfinished movie Game of Death) as an alternate costume. Later Tekken games gave the Lee-alike Law a gruesome biker mustache, which doesn't blur the resemblance quite as much as you might think.
Strangely, games that are actually about Bruce Lee - like Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story and Bruce Lee: Quest of the Dragon - haven't done as well. Mainly because they suck. On that note, here's a brief message to anyone thinking about making another Lee game (which we can only assume you'll name Quest Story: Dragon of the Bruce Lee): the man's face alone is not enough to sell a game. Seriously, we can get that anywhere.
