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This iconic fighting game retains its share of secrets and the power to astonish, more than 30 years after its first appearance in coin-op establishments. The recent anthology spanning the franchise's earliest days, featuring four original arcade titles, various home ports, and spinoffs, goes beyond just a well-emulated collection of iconic titles along with lesser-known entries — it additionally serves as a detailed chronicle about the making of the legendary series.

As a dedicated Mortal Kombat fan who has paid close attention its origins and transformation, there was plenty new for me to understand and value about the series.

What Makes the Historical Compilation

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like other vintage game anthologies from developer Digital Eclipse, portion educational film, part playable archive. The collection includes simulated releases of the pioneering arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, including television and mobile versions of certain releases. The anthology additionally contains the series' ventures at spinoffs, like action-oriented titles Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — some of the brand's least successful installments.

The Legacy Kollection thus isn't a “best of” collection, but a study of Mortal Kombat's early days, when the creators at Midway and franchise originators the creative duo behind the series were determining how to create a combat title, digitized from footage of actual people, as they went along. Viewing the historical footage — that features archival footage, recent conversations, and reproductions of classic advertisements, graphic novels, and even interoffice faxes — it's remarkable to see how the series transformed from modest origins to a worldwide phenomenon. It's truly remarkable to watch a handful of young game developers, working with minimal planning or guidance, channel their pop-culture interests into establishing an enduring gaming brand.

Historical Section

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection traces the growth of the combat franchise and the developers' professional journeys at the now-defunct Midway. It further illustrates how these identical developers contended with how to regularly outdo their previous work, facing no small amount of demand to replicate their achievements. It represents an intriguing historical record made from video recordings and film-based pictures and hand-drawn illustrations, which showcase the DIY nature of the series' creation process and how oral tradition helped circulate its mysteries and secrets of MK in its peak period in gaming halls. Presented in manageable segments, it's an eminently watchable series of documentary shorts that spans games, comics, films and even the comical physical events. It also includes some never-implemented techniques and digital fighter representations among its archived development assets.

Interactive Experience

Distributed throughout the five-segment historical film's chronology are opportunities to engage with the games themselves. At certain intervals, audience members can jump into a combat game session or a home system version to revisit its gameplay and graphics, simulated with remarkable precision on contemporary systems.

I allocated the majority of my time playing the arcade classics, particularly Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Numerous titles here hold up, particularly during local multiplayer matches. But playing against the artificial intelligence fighters in these releases is a demonstration of how basic and unbalanced the coding existed in the franchise's pioneering releases. Computer-directed fighters clearly employ dishonest tactics or are conversely remarkably unintelligent. If you don't have someone to play against — network gaming is included in most titles in the collection, but too light on features — you'll be missing out.

Technical Presentation

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the collection, a combination of arcade, console, and handheld games, are faithfully recreated, though I have noticed a couple minor issues — mostly input lag and sporadic glitches, especially with Mortal Kombat 4. And while the games are largely presented as-is, the development team has incorporated various clever convenience enhancements and display customization choices. For example, players have the option to show each character's special moves on the display and choose to enable endless periods to execute finishing moves. There are also options for accessing hidden fighters, removing the requirement to complete complicated methods to access them.

Graphically, the titles can be played with a variety of filters and visual treatments. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection includes remarkably accurate options that simulate the traditional television screens of coin-op establishments or household displays, or the greenscale screen of a Game Boy. A notably appreciated element is the setting to activate gaming hall-style borders surrounding the screen, with the specific combat game you're playing accurately and softly reflecting against the faux black plastic borders. It's very artistically charming.

Additional Features

The collection includes numerous appreciated elements beyond the documentary and emulated arcade classics, including a music player that allows users to rediscover the tunes of various Mortal Kombat games excluding the sounds of combatants violently defeating each other. Additionally included are combatant descriptions that include bios and numerous narrative components shown through the demo sequences of coin-op titles and endings.

Lost Media Recovery

A particularly notable inclusion for committed franchise followers is the opportunity to play a segment of previously unavailable content in the form of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This specific release, a somewhat revised iteration of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an initial venture by the company at direct online competitive gaming in coin-op establishments. The online-enabled release of the game is virtually identical to UMK3, but provided the ability to compete against internet adversaries and included some minor glitch repairs and refinements. However, this network version never gained traction, in part