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Mortal Kombat retains its share of secrets and the ability to amaze, well past its 30th anniversary after its initial debut in gaming halls. The recent anthology covering the franchise's earliest days, featuring a quartet of arcade releases, various home ports, and related titles, transcends only a accurately simulated collection of iconic titles along with lesser-known entries — it's also a comprehensive historical account about the making of the iconic franchise.

As a dedicated enthusiast of the series who has paid close attention its development and progression, there was plenty new for me to understand and value about the series.

What Defines the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection comparable to other retro collections from the creators at Digital Eclipse, portion educational film, part playable archive. This compilation features 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. This compilation also features the franchise's attempts at spin-off titles, like combat-focused releases Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — among the series' worst entries.

The Legacy Kollection thus isn't a “best of” collection, but an exploration into the series' formative period, when developer Midway and series co-creators Ed Boon and John Tobias were figuring out how to make a fighting game, created from video recordings of actual people, through experimentation. Watching the documentary — containing vintage recordings, recent conversations, and digital copies of vintage posters, comics, and even company memos — it's incredible to witness how the series transformed from modest origins to a worldwide phenomenon. It's genuinely amazing to watch a handful of pioneering developers, operating with virtually no plan or supervision, channel their pop-culture interests into creating a legendary video game series.

Historical Section

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection documents the ascent of the fighting series and the founders' vocational paths at the currently closed Midway. It further illustrates how those same creators reckoned with how to routinely one-up themselves, experiencing considerable demand to replicate their triumphs. It represents an intriguing historical record composed of video recordings and film-based pictures and hand-drawn illustrations, which showcase the DIY nature of the franchise's production method and how word of mouth helped disseminate its secrets and hidden aspects of Mortal Kombat in its arcade heyday. Delivered in easily digestible portions, it's highly engaging series of documentary shorts that covers video games, graphic novels, movies and including the humorous real-world tour. The compilation also contains some unused moves and game character images among its cutting-room-floor content.

Interactive Experience

Placed within the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are invitations to experience the games themselves. At various points, users can directly access a game of Mortal Kombat or a home system version to revisit its gameplay and artistic style, simulated with remarkable precision on current technology.

I spent the bulk of my time experiencing the original arcade titles, especially Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Several releases here hold up, particularly during one-on-one local play. Yet competing with the artificial intelligence fighters in these releases is a reminder of how crude and unfair the coding existed in early Mortal Kombat games. AI-managed characters blatantly cheat to win or are otherwise dumb as rocks. Lacking someone to play against — network gaming is included in most titles in the collection, but too light on features — you'll be missing out.

Visual Options

The 23 playable Mortal Kombat games in the collection, a mix of arcade, console, and handheld games, are faithfully recreated, though I've observed a few small quirks — mainly control latency and the occasional bug, notably within Mortal Kombat 4. And while the games are primarily displayed authentically, the creators has incorporated various clever quality-of-life features and visual presentation options. For example, players have the option to display fighter-specific techniques during gameplay and choose to enable infinite time to perform a Fatality. Also included are choices for revealing concealed combatants, without having to perform obscure techniques to unlock them.

Graphically, the titles can be experienced with numerous visual enhancements and presentation styles. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection offers very realistic effects that reproduce the cathode-ray tube displays of arcades or home televisions, or the monochrome green display of a Game Boy. A particularly nice touch is the setting to activate gaming hall-style borders surrounding the screen, with the specific combat game you're playing precisely and gently mirroring against the simulated dark plastic edges. It's quite aesthetically pleasing.

Bonus Elements

The collection includes numerous nice touches beyond the documentary and emulated arcade classics, featuring an audio component that enables players to reexperience the soundtracks of different Mortal Kombat games absent the noise of fighters brutally eliminating opponents. Also present are combatant descriptions that include bios and numerous narrative components displayed via the idle displays of gaming hall releases and conclusions.

Historical Preservation

One of the biggest highlights for committed franchise followers is the opportunity to play a piece of "lost media" in the form of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This version of the game, a somewhat revised iteration of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an early attempt by Midway at head-to-head network battles in arcades. This network version of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but featured the capability to compete against internet adversaries and contained several small bug fixes and balance. Yet this online edition failed to achieve popularity, in part