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Mortal Kombat retains numerous undisclosed elements and the power to astonish, more than 30 years after its initial debut in gaming halls. A new collection spanning the series' initial period, comprising a quartet of arcade releases, several home system versions, and derivative games, is more than simply a faithfully reproduced set of legendary games including less celebrated releases — it's also a rich documentary about the development of the renowned brand.

Being a long-time devotee of the franchise who has paid close attention its development and progression, there was numerous fresh aspects for me to learn and appreciate about the series.

What Makes the Legacy Collection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like previous classic compilations from the development team Digital Eclipse, part historical documentation, portion interactive museum. The collection includes digitally recreated editions of the pioneering arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, along with home system and portable adaptations of certain releases. The anthology additionally contains the series' ventures at derivative games, like action games Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — among the series' least successful installments.

The Legacy Kollection consequently doesn't represent a greatest hits compilation, but an examination of the series' formative period, when developer Midway and franchise originators the creative duo behind the series were figuring out how to develop a battle series, produced using film material of live performers, on the fly. Watching the documentary — containing historical videos, recent conversations, and scans of old flyers, graphic novels, and including internal communications — it's remarkable to see how the series transformed from simple starts to a global sensation. It's genuinely amazing to see a group of pioneering developers, developing without clear direction or supervision, direct their entertainment passions into birthing an iconic game franchise.

Educational Component

The historical documentation of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection documents the ascent of the fighting series and its creators' careers at the now-defunct Midway. It further illustrates how those same creators reckoned with how to consistently surpass their achievements, facing no small amount of pressure to repeat their triumphs. It represents an intriguing historical record composed of analog films and traditional photos and hand-drawn illustrations, which demonstrate the hands-on approach of Mortal Kombat's development and how personal recommendations helped disseminate its secrets and secrets of MK in its arcade heyday. Delivered in easily digestible portions, it's highly engaging collection of mini-documentaries that spans games, comics, films and including the humorous real-world tour. The compilation also contains some never-implemented techniques and character sprites among its archived development assets.

Interactive Gaming

Placed within the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are invitations to experience the actual titles. At various points, users can directly access a Mortal Kombat title or a home system version to rediscover its combat system and graphics, recreated with impressive accuracy on modern hardware.

I spent the bulk of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, particularly Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Several releases here hold up, especially in direct competitive sessions. Yet competing with the aforementioned game's AI-controlled opponents is a testament to how primitive and unfair the development approached in the franchise's pioneering releases. AI-managed characters obviously use unfair advantages or are otherwise dumb as rocks. Lacking another person to compete with — network gaming is included in most titles in the collection, but rather basic in functionality — you'll be missing out.

Display Features

The two dozen available combat games in the anthology, a blend of arcade, console, and handheld games, are accurately emulated, though I detected a few small quirks — mainly control latency and intermittent errors, especially with Mortal Kombat 4. Although the titles are primarily displayed authentically, the creators has incorporated various clever convenience enhancements and visual presentation options. As an illustration, you can choose to display fighter-specific techniques on-screen and choose to enable unlimited duration to complete lethal techniques. There are also options for unlocking secret characters, without having to perform some esoteric trick to access them.

Graphically, the titles can be experienced with numerous filters and visual treatments. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection provides highly authentic effects that reproduce the CRT monitors of gaming halls or domestic TVs, or the greenscale screen of a portable gaming device. An especially welcome feature is the setting to activate gaming hall-style borders encircling the display, with the specific combat game you're playing precisely and gently mirroring against the faux black plastic borders. It's quite aesthetically pleasing.

Additional Features

There are plenty of welcome features besides the historical footage and recreated vintage titles, containing a soundtrack mode that allows users to rediscover the soundtracks of different fighting releases without the din of combatants violently defeating each other. Additionally included are fighter biographies that include bios and numerous narrative components shown through arcade games' attract mode screens and final sequences.

Historical Preservation

A particularly notable inclusion for committed franchise followers is the chance to experience a example of historically missing material in the form of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This particular edition, a somewhat revised iteration of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an initial venture by the company at one-on-one internet-based play in coin-op establishments. The online-enabled release of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but provided the ability to battle network competitors and contained several small error corrections and adjustments. But the Wavenet update never gained traction, in part