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Mortal Kombat still possesses its share of secrets and the capacity to surprise, more than 30 years after its original launch in coin-op establishments. The recent anthology spanning the brand's formative years, featuring a quartet of arcade releases, several home system versions, and spinoffs, goes beyond only a accurately simulated collection of iconic titles including less celebrated releases — it's also a detailed chronicle about the creation of the iconic franchise.

As a dedicated enthusiast of the series who has closely monitored its creation and evolution, there was numerous fresh aspects for me to discover and admire about the series.

What Constitutes the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection comparable to other vintage game anthologies from the development team Digital Eclipse, part documentary, section playable historical record. The collection includes emulated versions of the first arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, along with home system and portable adaptations of several of these titles. The anthology additionally contains the franchise's attempts at spin-off titles, 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 developer Midway and brand founders Ed Boon and John Tobias were determining how to make a fighting game, produced using film material of actual people, on the fly. Watching the documentary — which includes historical videos, recent conversations, and digital copies of vintage posters, comics, and even interoffice faxes — it's remarkable to see how Mortal Kombat went from humble beginnings to a worldwide phenomenon. It's genuinely amazing to watch a handful of early video game creators, working with minimal planning or oversight, direct their entertainment passions into establishing an enduring gaming brand.

Educational Component

The educational segment of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection charts the rise of Mortal Kombat and the developers' professional journeys at the no-longer-operating Midway. It subsequently demonstrates how those same creators reckoned with how to routinely one-up themselves, facing no small amount of pressure to repeat their achievements. It serves as a compelling period piece composed of video recordings and analog photographs and manual drawings, 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 arcade heyday. Delivered in easily digestible portions, it's highly engaging set of brief historical films that includes titles, illustrated stories, cinematic adaptations and including the humorous real-world tour. The compilation also contains some never-implemented techniques and character sprites among its archived development assets.

Interactive Experience

Distributed throughout the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are prompts to play the actual titles. At various points, audience members can jump into a combat game session or one of its home console ports to revisit its gameplay and visual presentation, recreated with impressive accuracy on contemporary systems.

I dedicated most of my time experiencing the original arcade titles, specifically Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Many of the games here hold up, particularly during one-on-one local play. However, facing the aforementioned game's AI-controlled opponents is a testament to how primitive and unfair the coding existed in early Mortal Kombat games. CPU-controlled opponents blatantly cheat to win or are otherwise dumb as rocks. If you don't have another person to compete with — internet multiplayer exists in most titles in the collection, but too light on features — the experience will be incomplete.

Display Features

The two dozen available combat games in the collection, a combination of arcade, console, and handheld games, are accurately emulated, though I have noticed a couple minor issues — mostly input lag and the occasional bug, especially with Mortal Kombat 4. And while the games are largely presented as-is, the development team has added several intelligent convenience enhancements and graphical adjustment settings. For example, you can choose to display fighter-specific techniques on-screen and choose to enable infinite time to execute finishing moves. Additionally available are settings for revealing concealed combatants, removing the requirement to complete some esoteric trick to access them.

Graphically, the titles can be played with a variety of visual enhancements and presentation styles. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection provides highly authentic effects that reproduce the CRT monitors of coin-op establishments or home televisions, or the limited color monitor of a Game Boy. A notably appreciated element is the option to have coin-op-inspired frames surrounding the screen, with the MK game of your choice faithfully and subtly duplicating against the simulated dark plastic edges. It's very artistically charming.

Bonus Elements

There are plenty of nice touches beyond the documentary and emulated arcade classics, featuring an audio component that enables players to reexperience the music from multiple combat titles absent the noise of combatants violently defeating each other. Also present are fighter biographies that contain backgrounds and the various bits of lore shown through the idle displays of gaming hall releases and endings.

Lost Media Recovery

One of the biggest highlights for committed franchise followers is the ability to access a segment of previously unavailable content in the form of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This particular edition, a somewhat revised iteration of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an pioneering effort from the developer at head-to-head network battles in coin-op establishments. The Wavenet Edition of the game is virtually identical to UMK3, but featured the capability to compete against internet adversaries and included some minor glitch repairs and refinements. Yet this online edition failed to achieve popularity, in part