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The Mortal Kombat series still possesses its share of secrets and the capacity to surprise, well past its 30th anniversary after its initial debut in gaming halls. The recent anthology covering the franchise's earliest days, featuring four original arcade titles, various home ports, and spinoffs, is more than just a well-emulated collection of iconic titles along with lesser-known entries — it additionally serves as a rich documentary about the creation of the legendary series.

Being a long-time devotee of the franchise who has carefully followed its origins and transformation, there was much to discover for me to understand and value about the series.

What Makes the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection similar to other vintage game anthologies from the creators at Digital Eclipse, part historical documentation, portion interactive museum. The collection includes digitally recreated editions of the original 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 — two of the franchise's worst entries.

The Legacy Kollection thus isn't a highlight reel anthology, but a study of the franchise's initial era, when the creators at Midway and brand founders the creative duo behind the series were figuring out how to make a fighting game, digitized from footage of real actors, as they went along. Viewing the historical footage — which includes archival footage, contemporary discussions, and scans of old flyers, graphic novels, and including internal communications — it's astonishing to observe how the series transformed from humble beginnings to a worldwide phenomenon. It's genuinely amazing to watch a handful of pioneering developers, developing without clear direction or oversight, focus their cultural enthusiasms into creating a legendary video game series.

Historical Section

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection documents the ascent of the combat franchise and the founders' vocational paths at the currently closed Midway. It subsequently demonstrates how the very same individuals addressed how to regularly outdo their previous work, experiencing considerable pressure to repeat their achievements. It's a fascinating time capsule composed of video recordings and analog photographs and pencil sketches, which showcase the DIY nature of the franchise's production method and how oral tradition helped circulate its mysteries and undisclosed elements of the series in its golden era in coin-op establishments. Presented in manageable segments, it's highly engaging series of documentary shorts that includes titles, illustrated stories, cinematic adaptations and including the humorous real-world tour. It also includes some unused moves and character sprites among its cutting-room-floor content.

Interactive Experience

Distributed throughout 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 console adaptation to revisit its gameplay and artistic style, emulated nearly perfectly on current technology.

I dedicated most of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, especially Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Numerous titles here hold up, especially in direct competitive sessions. Yet competing with the computer-controlled adversaries in these titles is a demonstration of how basic and unfair the programming was in the series' initial installments. CPU-controlled opponents clearly employ dishonest tactics or are conversely remarkably unintelligent. Without having someone to play against — online play is available in the majority of included games, but rather basic in functionality — you'll be missing out.

Technical Presentation

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the collection, a blend of arcade, console, and handheld games, are accurately emulated, though I've observed a few small quirks — mostly input lag and sporadic glitches, particularly in Mortal Kombat 4. And while the games are mostly shown in their original form, the creators has incorporated various clever quality-of-life features and graphical adjustment settings. For example, you can choose to show each character's special moves on-screen and select to activate unlimited duration to complete lethal techniques. There are also options for accessing hidden fighters, removing the requirement to complete some esoteric trick to access them.

Visually, the games can be enjoyed with multiple visual enhancements and presentation styles. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection offers very realistic options that simulate the CRT monitors of arcades or domestic TVs, or the monochrome green display of a portable gaming device. An especially welcome feature is the choice to enable gaming hall-style borders encircling the display, with the specific combat game you're playing faithfully and subtly duplicating against the faux black plastic borders. It's quite aesthetically pleasing.

Additional Features

The collection includes numerous nice touches beyond the documentary and emulated arcade classics, featuring an audio component that allows users to rediscover the soundtracks of different combat titles without the din of two kombatants viciously slaughtering each other. Also present are fighter biographies that feature histories and numerous narrative components presented by the idle displays of gaming hall releases and endings.

Lost Media Recovery

A particularly notable inclusion for dedicated series enthusiasts is the opportunity to play 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 early attempt by Midway at direct online competitive gaming in coin-op establishments. This network version of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but included the option to compete against internet adversaries and contained several small error corrections and adjustments. But the Wavenet update failed to achieve popularity, in part