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This iconic fighting game still possesses numerous undisclosed elements and the power to astonish, more than 30 years after its first appearance in coin-op establishments. This latest compilation including the brand's formative years, which includes four original arcade titles, various home ports, and spinoffs, transcends just a well-emulated series of classics including less celebrated releases — it additionally serves as a rich documentary about the development of the iconic franchise.

Even as a lifelong Mortal Kombat fan who has carefully followed its creation and evolution, there was numerous fresh aspects for me to understand and value about the series.

What Defines the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection similar to other vintage game anthologies from the development team Digital Eclipse, part historical documentation, section playable historical record. This compilation features emulated versions of the original arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, plus console and handheld ports of several of these titles. The collection even includes the brand's experiments at derivative games, like action games Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — two of the franchise's worst entries.

The Legacy Kollection is therefore not a “best of” collection, but an examination of Mortal Kombat's early days, when the creators at Midway and brand founders the creative duo behind the series were figuring out how to create a combat title, digitized from footage of actual people, through experimentation. Viewing the historical footage — which includes vintage recordings, recent conversations, and digital copies of vintage posters, comics, and even company memos — it's astonishing to observe how the franchise evolved from modest origins to a international craze. It's frankly astounding to observe several pioneering developers, developing without clear direction or supervision, focus their cultural enthusiasms into birthing an iconic game franchise.

Historical Section

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection charts the rise of the combat franchise and the founders' vocational paths at the now-defunct Midway. It further illustrates how these identical developers reckoned with how to consistently surpass their achievements, facing no small amount of pressure to repeat their success. It serves as a compelling period piece composed of analog films and film-based pictures and pencil sketches, which reveal the self-made character of the series' creation process and how oral tradition helped spread its rumors and hidden aspects of Mortal Kombat in its peak period in gaming halls. Delivered in easily digestible portions, it's thoroughly enjoyable collection of mini-documentaries that includes titles, illustrated stories, cinematic adaptations and even the silly live-action tour. The collection additionally features some unused moves and game character images among its previously unreleased material.

Interactive Gaming

Interspersed along the five-part documentary's timeline are opportunities to engage with the original releases. At certain intervals, audience members can jump into a game of Mortal Kombat or a console adaptation to rediscover its combat system and visual presentation, recreated with impressive accuracy on current technology.

I spent the bulk of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, specifically Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Numerous titles here hold up, notably with local multiplayer matches. But playing against the aforementioned game's AI-controlled opponents is a reminder of how crude and unfair the coding existed in the series' initial installments. AI-managed characters blatantly cheat to win or are otherwise dumb as rocks. If you don't have a human opponent — network gaming is included in the majority of included games, but rather basic in functionality — you'll miss the full enjoyment.

Technical Presentation

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the anthology, a mix of coin-op, home system, and portable titles, are accurately emulated, though I detected a couple minor issues — primarily delayed responses and sporadic glitches, especially with Mortal Kombat 4. Although the titles are mostly shown in their original form, the development team has added several intelligent user experience improvements and graphical adjustment settings. As an illustration, you can choose to reveal combatant-unique actions during gameplay and opt to have infinite time to complete lethal techniques. Additionally available are settings for unlocking secret characters, without having to perform obscure techniques to unlock them.

Graphically, the titles can be enjoyed with multiple filters and visual treatments. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection offers very realistic effects that reproduce the cathode-ray tube displays of arcades or household displays, or the greenscale screen of a portable gaming device. An especially welcome feature is the option to have arcade-like bezels framing the gameplay, with the MK game of your choice precisely and gently mirroring against the artificial ebony plastic frames. It's remarkably visually appealing.

Bonus Elements

There are plenty of appreciated elements beyond the documentary and emulated arcade classics, featuring an audio component that enables players to reexperience the music from multiple combat titles without the din of combatants violently defeating each other. Also present are combatant descriptions that contain backgrounds and numerous narrative components shown through the demo sequences of coin-op titles and final sequences.

Lost Media Recovery

A particularly notable inclusion for dedicated series enthusiasts is the ability to access a segment of previously unavailable content in the form of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This specific release, a slightly updated version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an early attempt by Midway at one-on-one internet-based play in gaming halls. The online-enabled release of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but featured the capability to battle network competitors and contained several small glitch repairs and refinements. However, this network version didn't find widespread adoption, in part