🔗 Share this article

Mortal Kombat still possesses its share of secrets and the ability to amaze, more than 30 years after its original launch in gaming halls. The recent anthology including the franchise's earliest days, featuring four arcade games, various home ports, and derivative games, transcends just a well-emulated collection of iconic titles along with lesser-known entries — it's also a comprehensive historical account about the creation of the legendary series.

Being a long-time enthusiast of the series who has paid close attention its creation and evolution, there was numerous fresh aspects for me to learn and appreciate about the series.

What Makes the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection comparable to other vintage game anthologies from the development team Digital Eclipse, portion educational film, part playable archive. The anthology contains 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 some of those games. This compilation also features the franchise's attempts at spinoffs, like action games Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — among the series' least successful installments.

The Legacy Kollection is therefore not a highlight reel anthology, but a study of the franchise's initial era, when the creators at Midway and brand founders Ed Boon and John Tobias were determining how to make a fighting game, created from video recordings of actual people, through experimentation. Viewing the historical footage — that features historical videos, contemporary discussions, and reproductions of classic advertisements, illustrated stories, and including internal communications — it's astonishing to observe how the franchise evolved from modest origins to a international craze. It's truly remarkable to see a group of pioneering developers, developing without clear direction or oversight, channel their pop-culture interests into establishing an enduring gaming brand.

Documentary Portion

The educational segment of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection charts the rise of the combat franchise and the developers' professional journeys at the now-defunct Midway. It further illustrates how the very same individuals contended with how to consistently surpass their achievements, experiencing considerable stress to duplicate their achievements. It serves as a compelling period piece made from VHS tapes and traditional photos and manual drawings, which showcase the DIY nature of the series' creation process and how oral tradition helped disseminate its secrets and hidden aspects of Mortal Kombat in its golden era in coin-op establishments. Told in bite-sized chunks, it's highly engaging series of documentary shorts that spans games, comics, films and even the silly live-action tour. The collection additionally features some unreleased actions and character sprites among its previously unreleased material.

Interactive Experience

Interspersed along the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are prompts to play the actual titles. At certain intervals, audience members can jump into a game of Mortal Kombat or one of its home console ports to rediscover its combat system and graphics, emulated nearly perfectly 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 remain enjoyable, particularly during one-on-one local play. However, facing the aforementioned game's AI-controlled opponents is a demonstration of how basic and unfair the development approached in early Mortal Kombat games. AI-managed characters obviously use unfair advantages or are conversely remarkably unintelligent. Lacking a human opponent — internet multiplayer exists in most titles in the collection, but too light on features — you'll miss the full enjoyment.

Visual Options

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the collection, a combination of arcade, console, and handheld games, are accurately emulated, though I detected a few small quirks — mostly input lag and intermittent errors, particularly in Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are mostly shown in their original form, developer Digital Eclipse has added several intelligent convenience enhancements and visual presentation options. For example, you can choose to reveal combatant-unique actions during gameplay and opt to have infinite time to complete lethal techniques. There are also options for accessing hidden fighters, removing the requirement to complete some esoteric trick to obtain them.

Visually, the games can be enjoyed with multiple graphical effects and display options. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection includes remarkably accurate filters that mimic the traditional television screens of coin-op establishments or household displays, or the limited color monitor of a Game Boy. A notably appreciated element is the setting to activate arcade-like bezels surrounding the screen, with the specific combat game you're playing faithfully and subtly duplicating against the artificial ebony plastic frames. It's very artistically charming.

Bonus Elements

Players will discover multiple appreciated elements beyond the historical footage and recreated vintage titles, including a music player that enables players to reexperience the tunes of various Mortal Kombat games excluding the sounds of fighters brutally eliminating opponents. Also present are combatant descriptions that include bios and multiple story elements displayed via arcade games' attract mode screens and endings.

Archival Discovery

A particularly notable inclusion for dedicated series enthusiasts is the ability to access a example of historically missing material in the form of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This particular edition, a moderately improved edition of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an early attempt by Midway at head-to-head network battles in coin-op establishments. The Wavenet Edition of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but provided the ability to challenge online opponents and included some minor glitch repairs and refinements. But the Wavenet update never gained traction, in part