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Mortal Kombat continues to hold its share of secrets and the capacity to surprise, well past its 30th anniversary after its original launch in coin-op establishments. This latest compilation covering the franchise's earliest days, which includes four original arcade titles, various home ports, and spinoffs, is more than just a well-emulated collection of iconic titles along with lesser-known entries — it's also a rich documentary about the making of the legendary series.

Being a long-time Mortal Kombat fan who has paid close attention its origins and transformation, there was numerous fresh aspects for me to discover and admire about the series.

What Defines the Legacy Collection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection comparable to other retro collections from developer Digital Eclipse, portion educational film, portion interactive museum. The collection includes digitally recreated editions 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. This compilation also features the franchise's attempts at spinoffs, like action games Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — two of the franchise's worst entries.

The Legacy Kollection thus isn't a greatest hits compilation, but an exploration into the franchise's initial era, when the development team Midway and franchise originators Ed Boon and John Tobias were determining how to develop a battle series, created from video recordings of actual people, on the fly. Watching the documentary — which includes historical videos, new interviews, and reproductions of classic advertisements, comics, and including internal communications — it's incredible to witness how the series transformed from modest origins to a global sensation. It's frankly astounding to watch a handful of early video game creators, working with minimal planning or supervision, focus their cultural enthusiasms into birthing an iconic game franchise.

Historical Section

The historical documentation of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection documents the ascent of Mortal Kombat and its creators' careers at the no-longer-operating Midway. It further illustrates how those same creators reckoned with how to consistently surpass their achievements, experiencing considerable demand to replicate their success. It represents an intriguing historical record made from video recordings and analog photographs and pencil sketches, which demonstrate the hands-on approach of the series' creation process and how word of mouth helped disseminate its secrets and undisclosed elements of the series in its peak period in gaming halls. Told in bite-sized chunks, it's an eminently watchable set of brief historical films that covers video games, graphic novels, movies and even the comical physical events. The compilation also contains some never-implemented techniques and game character images among its archived development assets.

Playable Component

Placed within the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are invitations to experience the actual titles. During specific moments, audience members can jump into a Mortal Kombat title or one of its home console ports to rediscover its combat system and artistic style, emulated nearly perfectly on contemporary systems.

I allocated the majority of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, especially Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Several releases here stand the test of time, notably with direct competitive sessions. Yet competing with the aforementioned game's AI-controlled opponents is a demonstration of how basic and unbalanced the development approached in the series' initial installments. CPU-controlled opponents blatantly cheat to win or are otherwise dumb as rocks. If you don't have someone to play against — online play is available in the majority of included games, but somewhat limited in options — you'll be missing out.

Technical Presentation

The 23 playable Mortal Kombat games in the collection, a blend of coin-op, home system, and portable titles, are accurately emulated, though I detected a handful slight anomalies — mostly input lag and sporadic glitches, notably within Mortal Kombat 4. Although the titles are mostly shown in their original form, the development team has incorporated various clever user experience improvements and display customization choices. For example, users can elect to show each character's special moves during gameplay and select to activate infinite time to perform a Fatality. There are also options for revealing concealed combatants, without having to perform complicated methods to obtain them.

Graphically, the titles can be experienced with numerous visual enhancements and presentation styles. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection includes remarkably accurate filters that mimic the cathode-ray tube displays of arcades or household displays, or the greenscale screen of a portable gaming device. An especially welcome feature is the choice to enable gaming hall-style borders encircling the display, with the MK game of your choice accurately and softly reflecting against the faux black plastic borders. It's quite aesthetically pleasing.

Bonus Elements

There are plenty of nice touches beyond the educational material and simulated classic games, including a music player that allows users to rediscover the tunes of various fighting releases excluding the sounds of two kombatants viciously slaughtering each other. There are also character profiles that include bios and multiple story elements displayed via the idle displays of gaming hall releases and final sequences.

Archival Discovery

A particularly notable inclusion for committed franchise followers is the opportunity to play a example of historically missing material in the form of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This specific release, a moderately improved edition of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an initial venture by the company at direct online competitive gaming in gaming halls. The Wavenet Edition of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but provided the ability to battle network competitors and included some minor bug fixes and balance. However, this network version failed to achieve popularity, in part