🔗 Share this article

This iconic fighting game still possesses numerous undisclosed elements and the capacity to surprise, over three decades after its initial debut in coin-op establishments. The recent anthology covering the brand's formative years, featuring four arcade games, various home ports, and spinoffs, transcends only a accurately simulated series of classics including less celebrated releases — it functions as a detailed chronicle about the creation of the renowned brand.

Even as a lifelong enthusiast of the series who has paid close attention its creation and evolution, there was plenty new for me to learn and appreciate about the series.

What Makes the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection similar to previous classic compilations from the development team Digital Eclipse, part documentary, portion interactive museum. The anthology contains simulated releases of the pioneering arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, plus console and handheld ports of several of these titles. This compilation also features the franchise's attempts at derivative games, like combat-focused releases Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — two of the franchise's worst entries.

The Legacy Kollection consequently doesn't represent a “best of” collection, but an exploration into the franchise's initial era, when developer Midway and franchise originators Ed Boon and John Tobias were discovering methods to develop a battle series, digitized from footage of live performers, as they went along. Viewing the historical footage — which includes vintage recordings, recent conversations, and digital copies of vintage posters, illustrated stories, and even interoffice faxes — it's astonishing to observe how the franchise evolved from simple starts to a global sensation. It's truly remarkable to watch a handful of pioneering developers, developing without clear direction or supervision, channel their pop-culture interests into creating a legendary video game series.

Educational Component

The historical documentation of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection traces the growth of Mortal Kombat and its creators' careers at the no-longer-operating Midway. It subsequently demonstrates how those same creators contended with how to routinely one-up themselves, encountering significant stress to duplicate their achievements. It represents an intriguing historical record made from analog films and traditional photos and manual drawings, which demonstrate the hands-on approach of the franchise's production method and how oral tradition helped circulate its mysteries and hidden aspects of Mortal Kombat in its peak period in gaming halls. Delivered in easily digestible portions, it's highly engaging series of documentary shorts that spans games, comics, films and even the comical physical events. The collection additionally features some unreleased actions and digital fighter representations among its archived development assets.

Playable Component

Placed within the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are prompts to play the original releases. During specific moments, viewers can hop into a game of Mortal Kombat or one of its home console ports to rediscover its combat system and visual presentation, recreated with impressive accuracy on contemporary systems.

I dedicated most of my time playing the arcade classics, especially 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 artificial intelligence fighters in these releases is a reminder of how crude and unbalanced the development approached in the series' initial installments. AI-managed characters blatantly cheat to win or are otherwise dumb as rocks. Lacking a human opponent — online play is available in numerous anthology releases, but somewhat limited in options — the experience will be incomplete.

Display Features

The 23 playable Mortal Kombat games in the anthology, a mix of gaming hall, television, and mobile releases, are accurately emulated, though I detected a couple minor issues — mostly input lag and sporadic glitches, particularly in Mortal Kombat 4. And while the games are largely presented as-is, the development team has added several intelligent convenience enhancements and visual presentation options. For instance, players have the option to reveal combatant-unique actions during gameplay and opt to have endless periods to perform a Fatality. Also included are choices for unlocking secret characters, without having to perform obscure techniques to obtain them.

Visually, the games can be played with a variety of filters and visual treatments. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection provides highly authentic filters that mimic the CRT monitors of arcades or home televisions, or the greenscale screen of a Game Boy. An especially welcome feature is the setting to activate coin-op-inspired frames encircling the display, with your selected Mortal Kombat title accurately and softly reflecting against the simulated dark plastic edges. It's remarkably visually appealing.

Additional Features

The collection includes numerous nice touches beyond the historical footage and recreated vintage titles, containing a soundtrack mode that allows users to rediscover the music from multiple Mortal Kombat games without the din of two kombatants viciously slaughtering each other. There are also character profiles that include bios and numerous narrative components shown through arcade games' attract mode screens and conclusions.

Lost Media Recovery

One of the biggest highlights for hardcore Mortal Kombat fans is the ability to access a example of historically missing material in the format of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This version of the game, a moderately improved edition of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an initial venture by the company at head-to-head network battles in gaming halls. This network version of the game is virtually identical to UMK3, but included the option to battle network competitors and contained several small bug fixes and balance. However, this network version didn't find widespread adoption, in part