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Mortal Kombat retains numerous undisclosed elements and the capacity to surprise, over three decades after its original launch in coin-op establishments. The recent anthology spanning the series' initial period, featuring four original arcade titles, various home ports, and spinoffs, goes beyond just a well-emulated collection of iconic titles and not-so-classics — it's also a comprehensive historical account about the development of the renowned brand.

Even as a lifelong devotee of the franchise who has carefully followed its origins and transformation, there was plenty new for me to discover and admire about the series.

What Makes the Historical Compilation

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like other retro collections from developer Digital Eclipse, portion educational film, part playable archive. The collection includes emulated versions of the pioneering arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, including television and mobile versions of several of these titles. This compilation also features the franchise's attempts at spin-off titles, like combat-focused releases Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — two of the franchise's most criticized releases.

The Legacy Kollection thus isn't a greatest hits compilation, but an exploration into the franchise's initial era, when the creators at Midway and series co-creators the visionary developers were discovering methods to create a combat title, produced using film material of actual people, as they went along. Viewing the historical footage — that features archival footage, recent conversations, and scans of old flyers, comics, and including internal communications — it's incredible to witness how Mortal Kombat went from modest origins to a international craze. It's truly remarkable to observe several early video game creators, working with minimal planning or supervision, channel their pop-culture interests into creating a legendary video game series.

Historical Section

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection documents the ascent of the fighting series and the founders' vocational paths 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 triumphs. It represents an intriguing historical record composed of video recordings and film-based pictures and hand-drawn illustrations, which reveal the self-made character of Mortal Kombat's development and how personal recommendations helped circulate its mysteries and hidden aspects of Mortal Kombat in its golden era in coin-op establishments. Told in bite-sized chunks, it's thoroughly enjoyable set of brief historical films that covers video games, graphic novels, movies and even the silly live-action tour. The compilation also contains some unused moves and character sprites among its cutting-room-floor content.

Interactive Experience

Placed within the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are opportunities to engage with the actual titles. At various points, viewers can hop into a combat game session or a home system version to reexperience its mechanics and visual presentation, simulated with remarkable precision on modern hardware.

I allocated the majority of my time playing the arcade classics, particularly Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Several releases here stand the test of time, particularly during one-on-one local play. Yet competing with the aforementioned game's AI-controlled opponents is a demonstration of how basic and unbalanced the development approached in early Mortal Kombat games. CPU-controlled opponents blatantly cheat to win or are alternatively incredibly stupid. Without having another person to compete with — online play is available in most titles in the collection, but rather basic in functionality — the experience will be incomplete.

Visual Options

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the compilation, a combination of coin-op, home system, and portable titles, are faithfully recreated, though I detected a couple minor issues — mainly control latency and intermittent errors, especially with Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are mostly shown in their original form, the creators has included some smart quality-of-life features and display customization choices. As an illustration, users can elect to show each character's special moves on-screen and select to activate infinite time to perform a Fatality. Additionally available are settings for unlocking secret characters, removing the requirement to complete some esoteric trick to access them.

Visually, the games can be enjoyed with multiple filters and visual treatments. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection offers very realistic options that simulate the cathode-ray tube displays of gaming halls or home televisions, or the greenscale screen of a Nintendo handheld. A particularly nice touch is the option to have 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 remarkably visually appealing.

Bonus Elements

There are plenty of welcome features besides the documentary and emulated arcade classics, including a music player that lets you revisit the soundtracks of different Mortal Kombat games excluding the sounds of fighters brutally eliminating opponents. Also present are character profiles that contain backgrounds and multiple story elements presented by the demo sequences of coin-op titles and endings.

Historical Preservation

One of the biggest highlights 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 particular edition, a moderately improved edition of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an early attempt by Midway at one-on-one internet-based play in coin-op establishments. This network version of the game is virtually identical to UMK3, but featured the capability to battle network competitors and included some minor bug fixes and balance. Yet this online edition didn't find widespread adoption, in part