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Mortal Kombat retains many hidden mysteries and the capacity to surprise, well past its 30th anniversary after its original launch in arcades. This latest compilation including the brand's formative years, which includes four original arcade titles, several home system versions, and spinoffs, goes beyond just a well-emulated collection of iconic titles including less celebrated releases — it additionally serves as a comprehensive historical account about the making of the legendary series.

Even as a lifelong Mortal Kombat fan who has paid close attention its development and progression, there was numerous fresh aspects for me to understand and value about the series.

What Makes the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like previous classic compilations from developer Digital Eclipse, portion educational film, part playable archive. This compilation features digitally recreated editions of the original 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 brand's experiments at spinoffs, like action games Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — some of the brand's worst entries.

The Legacy Kollection thus isn't a highlight reel anthology, but an examination of the franchise's initial era, when the development team Midway and brand founders the visionary developers were discovering methods to develop a battle series, produced using film material of real actors, through experimentation. Watching the documentary — which includes vintage recordings, contemporary discussions, and scans of old flyers, illustrated stories, and including internal communications — it's astonishing to observe how the series transformed from humble beginnings to a international craze. It's genuinely amazing 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.

Historical Section

The historical documentation of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection documents the ascent of the fighting series and its creators' careers at the no-longer-operating Midway. It then goes on to show how the very same individuals addressed how to regularly outdo their previous work, encountering significant demand to replicate their triumphs. It represents an intriguing historical record made from video recordings and traditional photos and pencil sketches, which demonstrate the hands-on approach of the franchise's production method and how oral tradition helped spread its rumors and undisclosed elements of the series in its arcade heyday. Told in bite-sized chunks, it's thoroughly enjoyable collection of mini-documentaries that covers video games, graphic novels, movies and even the silly live-action tour. The collection additionally features some unused moves and character sprites among its archived development assets.

Playable Component

Interspersed along the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are opportunities to engage with the original releases. At various points, viewers can hop into a Mortal Kombat title or a home system version to revisit its gameplay and artistic style, recreated with impressive accuracy on current technology.

I spent the bulk of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, specifically Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Several releases here stand the test of time, notably with one-on-one local play. However, facing the artificial intelligence fighters in these releases is a demonstration of how basic and unjust the coding existed in the series' initial installments. AI-managed characters obviously use unfair advantages or are conversely remarkably unintelligent. Without having a human opponent — network gaming is included in most titles in the collection, but rather basic in functionality — you'll miss the full enjoyment.

Display Features

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the collection, a mix of gaming hall, television, and mobile releases, are precisely simulated, though I've observed a handful slight anomalies — primarily delayed responses and intermittent errors, particularly in Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are mostly shown in their original form, developer Digital Eclipse has incorporated various clever quality-of-life features and graphical adjustment settings. For example, players have the option to reveal combatant-unique actions during gameplay and opt to have unlimited duration to complete lethal techniques. Additionally available are settings for accessing hidden fighters, removing the requirement to complete obscure techniques to obtain them.

Visually, the games can be played with a variety of visual enhancements and presentation styles. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection includes remarkably accurate effects that reproduce the cathode-ray tube displays of gaming halls or domestic TVs, or the limited color monitor of a Nintendo handheld. An especially welcome feature is the option to have gaming hall-style borders encircling the display, with the MK game of your choice accurately and softly reflecting against the artificial ebony plastic frames. It's remarkably visually appealing.

Extra Content

There are plenty of welcome features besides the historical footage and recreated vintage titles, containing a soundtrack mode that allows users to rediscover the soundtracks of different Mortal Kombat games excluding the sounds of two kombatants viciously slaughtering each other. Also present are fighter biographies that contain backgrounds and numerous narrative components displayed via arcade games' attract mode screens and endings.

Archival Discovery

Among the most significant features for committed franchise followers is the ability to access a segment of previously unavailable content in the guise of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This particular edition, a somewhat revised iteration of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an early attempt by Midway at direct online competitive gaming in arcades. The Wavenet Edition of the game is virtually identical to UMK3, but included the option to compete against internet adversaries and contained several small glitch repairs and refinements. However, this network version never gained traction, in part