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Mortal Kombat continues to hold many hidden mysteries and the ability to amaze, over three decades after its initial debut in gaming halls. The recent anthology covering the brand's formative years, featuring four original arcade titles, various home ports, and derivative games, is more than just a well-emulated set of legendary games including less celebrated releases — it functions as a detailed chronicle about the development of the renowned brand.

Even as a lifelong Mortal Kombat fan who has carefully followed its origins and transformation, there was much to discover for me to discover and admire about the series.

What Makes the Historical Compilation

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection similar to previous classic compilations from the creators at Digital Eclipse, portion educational film, part playable archive. This compilation features digitally recreated editions of the first arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, plus console and handheld ports of certain releases. The collection even includes the brand's experiments at spinoffs, 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 “best of” collection, but a study of Mortal Kombat's early days, when the development team Midway and brand founders the creative duo behind the series were figuring out how to make a fighting game, created from video recordings of real actors, on the fly. Viewing the historical footage — which includes historical videos, recent conversations, and reproductions of classic advertisements, graphic novels, and even company memos — it's incredible to witness how the franchise evolved from humble beginnings to a global sensation. It's genuinely amazing to see a group of young game developers, operating with virtually no plan or guidance, channel their pop-culture interests into establishing an enduring gaming brand.

Documentary Portion

The historical documentation of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection charts the rise of the fighting series and its creators' careers at the no-longer-operating Midway. It subsequently demonstrates how those same creators contended with how to regularly outdo their previous work, encountering significant demand to replicate their success. It represents an intriguing historical record composed of VHS tapes and film-based pictures and manual drawings, which reveal the self-made character of the series' creation process and how oral tradition helped disseminate its secrets and undisclosed elements of the series in its golden era in coin-op establishments. Presented in manageable segments, it's an eminently watchable series of documentary shorts that spans games, comics, films and even the comical physical events. The collection additionally features some unused moves and game character images among its archived development assets.

Interactive Experience

Placed within the five-part documentary's timeline are invitations to experience the games themselves. At certain intervals, viewers can hop into a combat game session or a home system version to reexperience its mechanics and graphics, simulated with remarkable precision 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 remain enjoyable, especially in one-on-one local play. Yet competing with the computer-controlled adversaries in these titles is a reminder of how crude and unbalanced the coding existed in the series' initial installments. Computer-directed fighters clearly employ dishonest tactics or are conversely remarkably unintelligent. If you don't have another person to compete with — online play is available in most titles in the collection, but too light on features — you'll be missing out.

Display Features

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the collection, a blend of coin-op, home system, and portable titles, are accurately emulated, though I have noticed a few small quirks — mostly input lag and intermittent errors, notably within Mortal Kombat 4. And while the games are mostly shown in their original form, the development team has added several intelligent user experience improvements and graphical adjustment settings. For instance, players have the option to show each character's special moves on the display and choose to enable infinite time to complete lethal techniques. There are also options for unlocking secret characters, removing the requirement to complete some esoteric trick to obtain them.

Visually, the games can be experienced with numerous graphical effects and display options. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection offers very realistic options that simulate the cathode-ray tube displays of coin-op establishments or home televisions, or the limited color monitor of a portable gaming device. A particularly nice touch is the option to have arcade-like bezels encircling the display, with the specific combat game you're playing precisely and gently mirroring against the artificial ebony plastic frames. It's remarkably visually appealing.

Extra Content

The collection includes numerous welcome features besides the educational material and simulated classic games, containing a soundtrack mode that lets you revisit the music from multiple combat titles excluding the sounds of combatants violently defeating each other. There are also combatant descriptions that include bios and the various bits of lore displayed via arcade games' attract mode screens and final sequences.

Historical Preservation

A particularly notable inclusion for hardcore Mortal Kombat fans is the opportunity to play a example of historically missing material in the form of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This version of the game, a slightly updated version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an pioneering effort from the developer at direct online competitive gaming in coin-op establishments. The Wavenet Edition of the game is virtually identical to UMK3, but featured the capability to challenge online opponents and included some minor error corrections and adjustments. But the Wavenet update didn't find widespread adoption, in part