AndWeAllFallDown:

Originally Mike was a member of the group of scavengers that surrounded and attacked Christa in “All that Remains”, the first episode of Season 2. If you look closely at the characters surrounding Christa, you’ll see that one of them does bear a resemblance to Mike. This character is obviously not Mike but they do look similar (I’ll post a link to the character it is after this paragraph). As fans of the game have noticed, part of Mike’s ear is missing. The original story that had Mike as part of those scavengers would have explained that the gunshot heard actually took part of Mike’s ear off (in the changed version we had no idea what happened with the gunshot or what happened with Mike’s ear). We would next see Mike at Howe’s (where we do see him for the first time in the game), where he would try to convince Clementine that he’s not a bad person after the Christa incident a couple of episodes before.

As we know, Mike doesn’t appear in “All That Remains”, wasn’t part of the scavengers and we only meet him for the first time at Howe’s. However, like I said a character that looks similar to Mike does indeed appear in “All That Remains”: http://walkingdead.wikia.com/wiki/Ralph

This is 100% real. You want proof? I interviewed Dan White (Mike’s VA):

If you want to listen back to the interview check out these links (Skype crashed a couple of times hence the three recordings):

http://mixlr.com/channel-1138/showreel/channel-1138s-mixlr-55/

http://mixlr.com/channel-1138/showreel/channel-1138s-mixlr-56/

http://mixlr.com/channel-1138/showreel/channel-1138s-mixlr-57/

[Source]

Me:

Dear Telltale, why do you keep cutting interesting character development and plot points from your game? This is exactly what Mike needed. We would’ve gotten a mention on Christa, we would’ve had the issue of trust again and if you can forgive and trust a guy that got you separated from your friend. It would’ve been great character development and made Mike more important to the storyline instead feeling like he’s an extra with no real purpose! T_T how could you do this to Mikey!?

The interesting thing as well is from the interview, is that the group was going to react differently to meeting Mike because of him originally being part of the scavenge group that attacked Christa and would’ve had him having to convince them not to kill him. But it would explain why Kenny behaved so aggressive to Mike back at Howe’s and why Luke was so distrustful of him in Amid The Ruins, if originally he was intended to be this character who got turned into Ralph in the rewrite.