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The Mortal Kombat series continues to hold many hidden mysteries and the power to astonish, more than 30 years after its original launch in arcades. A new collection including the brand's formative years, which includes a quartet of arcade releases, various home ports, and related titles, transcends just a well-emulated collection of iconic titles along with lesser-known entries — it's also a comprehensive historical account about the making of the iconic franchise.

Even as a lifelong devotee of the franchise who has carefully followed its creation and evolution, there was plenty new for me to understand and value about the series.

What Defines the Legacy Collection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection comparable to previous classic compilations from the development team Digital Eclipse, part documentary, part playable archive. The anthology contains simulated releases of the original arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, plus console and handheld ports of some of those games. The anthology additionally contains the brand's experiments at spinoffs, like combat-focused releases Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — some of the brand's 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 creators at Midway and franchise originators the visionary developers were discovering methods to develop a battle series, created from video recordings of actual people, as they went along. Viewing the historical footage — that features archival footage, contemporary discussions, and digital copies of vintage posters, illustrated stories, and even company memos — it's astonishing to observe how the series transformed from modest origins to a international craze. It's frankly astounding to see a group of young game developers, operating with virtually no plan or supervision, channel their pop-culture interests into establishing an enduring gaming brand.

Historical Section

The historical documentation of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection traces the growth of the combat franchise and its creators' careers at the currently closed Midway. It subsequently demonstrates how these identical developers contended with how to consistently surpass their achievements, encountering significant pressure to repeat their triumphs. It serves as a compelling period piece constructed using analog films and film-based pictures and hand-drawn illustrations, which showcase the DIY nature of Mortal Kombat's development and how personal recommendations helped circulate its mysteries and secrets of MK in its peak period in gaming halls. Told in bite-sized chunks, it's highly engaging collection of mini-documentaries that covers video games, graphic novels, movies and even the silly live-action tour. It also includes some unused moves and character sprites among its archived development assets.

Interactive Gaming

Placed within the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are prompts to play the original releases. At certain intervals, users can directly access a Mortal Kombat title or a home system version to reexperience its mechanics and visual presentation, recreated with impressive accuracy on modern hardware.

I dedicated most of my time experiencing the original arcade titles, particularly Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Numerous titles here remain enjoyable, especially in one-on-one local play. However, facing the artificial intelligence fighters in these releases is a reminder of how crude and unfair the programming was in early Mortal Kombat games. CPU-controlled opponents clearly employ dishonest tactics or are otherwise dumb as rocks. If you don't have a human opponent — internet multiplayer exists in numerous anthology releases, but rather basic in functionality — you'll miss the full enjoyment.

Visual Options

The two dozen available combat games in the compilation, a mix of arcade, console, and handheld games, are precisely simulated, though I've observed a few small quirks — primarily delayed responses and the occasional bug, particularly in Mortal Kombat 4. Although the titles are mostly shown in their original form, the development team has added several intelligent quality-of-life features and graphical adjustment settings. For instance, users can elect to show each character's special moves during gameplay and choose to enable endless periods to execute finishing moves. Additionally available are settings for accessing hidden fighters, removing the requirement to complete complicated methods to access 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 coin-op establishments or domestic TVs, or the greenscale screen of a portable gaming device. A notably appreciated element is the option to have gaming hall-style borders encircling the display, with your selected Mortal Kombat title accurately and softly reflecting against the artificial ebony plastic frames. It's very artistically charming.

Extra Content

There are plenty of welcome features besides the historical footage and recreated vintage titles, including a music player that enables players to reexperience the music from multiple Mortal Kombat games absent the noise of combatants violently defeating each other. Also present are combatant descriptions that contain backgrounds and multiple story elements displayed via the demo sequences of coin-op titles and endings.

Lost Media Recovery

Among the most significant features for dedicated series enthusiasts is the opportunity to play a piece of "lost media" in the format of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This specific release, a moderately improved edition of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an early attempt by Midway at one-on-one internet-based play in arcades. This network version of the game is practically indistinguishable to UMK3, but included the option to battle network competitors and contained several small glitch repairs and refinements. Yet this online edition didn't find widespread adoption, in part