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This iconic fighting game retains its share of secrets and the power to astonish, more than 30 years after its original launch in coin-op establishments. This latest compilation including the franchise's earliest days, featuring four arcade games, multiple console adaptations, and derivative games, transcends just a well-emulated collection of iconic titles along with lesser-known entries — it additionally serves as a comprehensive historical account about the development of the renowned brand.

As a dedicated Mortal Kombat fan who has closely monitored its creation and evolution, there was much to discover for me to understand and value about the series.

What Makes the Legacy Collection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like other vintage game anthologies from the development team Digital Eclipse, part historical documentation, portion interactive museum. This compilation features digitally recreated editions of the pioneering arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, including television and mobile versions of certain releases. The collection even includes the brand's experiments at derivative games, like action-oriented titles 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 greatest hits compilation, but an exploration into the series' formative period, when the creators at Midway and series co-creators the visionary developers were figuring out how to make a fighting game, produced using film material of real actors, as they went along. Watching the documentary — containing historical videos, contemporary discussions, 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 global sensation. It's truly remarkable to observe several young game developers, operating with virtually no plan or guidance, channel their pop-culture interests into establishing an enduring gaming brand.

Historical Section

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection charts the rise of the fighting series and the developers' professional journeys at the currently closed Midway. It then goes on to show how these identical developers reckoned with how to consistently surpass their achievements, facing no small amount of demand to replicate their success. It represents an intriguing historical record constructed using analog films and film-based pictures and manual drawings, which showcase the DIY nature of the franchise's production method and how personal recommendations helped disseminate its secrets and undisclosed elements of the series in its golden era in coin-op establishments. Delivered in easily digestible portions, it's an eminently watchable series of documentary shorts that covers video games, graphic novels, movies and even the comical physical events. It also includes some unreleased actions and character sprites among its previously unreleased material.

Playable Component

Interspersed along the five-segment historical film's chronology are opportunities to engage with the original releases. During specific moments, audience members can jump into a combat game session or a home system version to rediscover its combat system and artistic style, simulated with remarkable precision 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 stand the test of time, particularly during local multiplayer matches. However, facing the aforementioned game's AI-controlled opponents is a testament to how primitive and unjust the development approached in early Mortal Kombat games. Computer-directed fighters clearly employ dishonest tactics or are alternatively incredibly stupid. Without having a human opponent — network gaming is included in most titles in the collection, but too light on features — you'll miss the full enjoyment.

Display Features

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the collection, a mix of gaming hall, television, and mobile releases, are faithfully recreated, though I have noticed a handful slight anomalies — mostly input lag and intermittent errors, especially with Mortal Kombat 4. And while the games are mostly shown in their original form, developer Digital Eclipse has incorporated various clever quality-of-life features and graphical adjustment settings. For instance, you can choose to show each character's special moves on-screen and choose to enable endless periods to execute finishing moves. Also included are choices for revealing concealed combatants, removing the requirement to complete some esoteric trick to obtain them.

Visually, the games can be played with a variety of graphical effects and display options. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection offers very realistic effects that reproduce the traditional television screens of coin-op establishments or domestic TVs, or the monochrome green display of a Nintendo handheld. An especially welcome feature is the setting to activate coin-op-inspired frames framing the gameplay, with your selected Mortal Kombat title faithfully and subtly duplicating against the simulated dark plastic edges. It's very artistically charming.

Extra Content

The collection includes numerous appreciated elements beyond the educational material and simulated classic games, containing a soundtrack mode that allows users to rediscover the tunes of various combat titles absent the noise of combatants violently defeating each other. There are also fighter biographies that feature histories and numerous narrative components presented by arcade games' attract mode screens and endings.

Historical Preservation

Among the most significant features for hardcore Mortal Kombat fans 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. The online-enabled release of the game is practically indistinguishable to UMK3, but provided the ability to challenge online opponents and contained several small error corrections and adjustments. Yet this online edition didn't find widespread adoption, in part