🔗 Share this article

This iconic fighting game still possesses many hidden mysteries and the power to astonish, well past its 30th anniversary after its first appearance in coin-op establishments. This latest compilation spanning the brand's formative years, featuring a quartet of arcade releases, several home system versions, and derivative games, goes beyond only a accurately simulated series of classics along with lesser-known entries — it functions as a detailed chronicle about the creation of the iconic franchise.

As a dedicated devotee of the franchise who has carefully followed its origins and transformation, there was numerous fresh aspects for me to learn and appreciate about the series.

What Makes the Legacy Collection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection comparable to other vintage game anthologies from the creators at Digital Eclipse, part historical documentation, part playable archive. The anthology contains simulated releases of the first arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, plus console and handheld ports of some of those games. This compilation also features the brand's experiments at spin-off titles, like action games Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — some of the brand's most criticized releases.

The Legacy Kollection consequently doesn't represent a greatest hits compilation, but an exploration into Mortal Kombat's early days, when developer Midway and franchise originators the visionary developers were discovering methods to create a combat title, created from video recordings of real actors, through experimentation. Observing the archival material — that features vintage recordings, new interviews, and digital copies of vintage posters, graphic novels, and including internal communications — it's incredible to witness how Mortal Kombat went from simple starts to a global sensation. It's frankly astounding to watch a handful of young game developers, developing without clear direction or supervision, channel their pop-culture interests into creating a legendary video game series.

Historical Section

The educational segment of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection documents the ascent of Mortal Kombat and its creators' careers at the no-longer-operating Midway. It subsequently demonstrates how the very same individuals contended with how to regularly outdo their previous work, facing no small amount of stress to duplicate their triumphs. It represents an intriguing historical record made from VHS tapes 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 undisclosed elements of the series in its golden era in coin-op establishments. Delivered in easily digestible portions, it's thoroughly enjoyable series of documentary shorts that includes titles, illustrated stories, cinematic adaptations and even the silly live-action tour. The collection additionally features some never-implemented techniques and character sprites among its cutting-room-floor content.

Interactive Experience

Distributed throughout the five-part documentary's timeline are prompts to play the games themselves. At certain intervals, viewers can hop into a Mortal Kombat title or one of its home console ports to reexperience its mechanics and visual presentation, recreated with impressive accuracy on contemporary systems.

I spent the bulk of my time playing the arcade classics, especially Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Many of the games here remain enjoyable, especially in local multiplayer matches. But playing against the artificial intelligence fighters in these releases is a reminder of how crude and unbalanced the programming was in the series' initial installments. AI-managed characters blatantly cheat to win or are otherwise dumb as rocks. If you don't have another person to compete with — network gaming is included in the majority of included games, but somewhat limited in options — you'll be missing out.

Technical Presentation

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the collection, a mix of arcade, console, and handheld games, are precisely simulated, though I've observed a few small quirks — primarily delayed responses and sporadic glitches, notably within Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are primarily displayed authentically, developer Digital Eclipse has incorporated various clever user experience improvements and graphical adjustment settings. For instance, players have the option to reveal combatant-unique actions during gameplay and opt to have unlimited duration to execute finishing moves. Additionally available are settings for unlocking secret characters, eliminating the need to execute some esoteric trick to access them.

Artistically, the releases can be enjoyed with multiple filters and visual treatments. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection provides highly authentic effects that reproduce the traditional television screens of gaming halls or home televisions, or the greenscale screen of a Game Boy. An especially welcome feature is the setting to activate gaming hall-style borders encircling the display, with your selected Mortal Kombat title precisely and gently mirroring against the faux black plastic borders. It's very artistically charming.

Additional Features

The collection includes numerous appreciated elements beyond the documentary and emulated arcade classics, containing a soundtrack mode that lets you revisit the soundtracks of different Mortal Kombat games excluding the sounds of combatants violently defeating each other. Additionally included are combatant descriptions that contain backgrounds and the various bits of lore shown through the demo sequences of coin-op titles and final sequences.

Historical Preservation

A particularly notable inclusion for hardcore Mortal Kombat fans is the ability to access a piece of "lost media" in the guise of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This particular edition, a moderately improved edition of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an pioneering effort from the developer at one-on-one internet-based play in coin-op establishments. This network version of the game is practically indistinguishable to UMK3, but featured the capability to challenge online opponents and contained several small bug fixes and balance. However, this network version never gained traction, in part