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The Mortal Kombat series retains its share of secrets and the ability to amaze, more than 30 years after its initial debut in coin-op establishments. This latest compilation including the series' initial period, comprising four arcade games, various home ports, and related titles, goes beyond simply a faithfully reproduced set of legendary games along with lesser-known entries — it's also a rich documentary about the making of the iconic franchise.

As a dedicated Mortal Kombat fan who has paid close attention its origins and transformation, there was numerous fresh aspects for me to learn and appreciate about the series.

What Makes the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection similar to other retro collections from the creators at Digital Eclipse, part historical documentation, portion interactive museum. The collection includes digitally recreated editions of the original arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, plus console and handheld ports of several of these titles. This compilation also features the series' ventures at spin-off titles, like combat-focused releases Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — some of the brand's worst entries.

The Legacy Kollection consequently doesn't represent a “best of” collection, but an examination of the series' formative period, when the creators at Midway and franchise originators Ed Boon and John Tobias were determining how to develop a battle series, produced using film material of live performers, through experimentation. Watching the documentary — which includes archival footage, contemporary discussions, and scans of old flyers, comics, and even interoffice faxes — it's remarkable to see how the franchise evolved from simple starts to a international craze. It's genuinely amazing to watch a handful of early video game creators, operating with virtually no plan or guidance, focus their cultural enthusiasms into birthing an iconic game franchise.

Historical Section

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection charts the rise of the combat franchise and the developers' professional journeys at the no-longer-operating Midway. It subsequently demonstrates how these identical developers addressed how to consistently surpass their achievements, experiencing considerable pressure to repeat their success. It represents an intriguing historical record constructed using analog films and film-based pictures and pencil sketches, which reveal the self-made character of Mortal Kombat's development and how oral tradition helped circulate its mysteries and undisclosed elements of the series in its arcade heyday. Presented in manageable segments, it's highly engaging collection of mini-documentaries that spans games, comics, films and even the silly live-action tour. It also includes some unreleased actions and game character images among its archived development assets.

Playable Component

Placed within the five-segment historical film's chronology are prompts to play the actual titles. During specific moments, viewers can hop into a Mortal Kombat title or a console adaptation to reexperience its mechanics and artistic style, recreated with impressive accuracy on contemporary systems.

I spent the bulk of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, especially Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Several releases here hold up, particularly during local multiplayer matches. But playing against the artificial intelligence fighters in these releases is a demonstration of how basic and unbalanced the coding existed in early Mortal Kombat games. AI-managed characters blatantly cheat to win or are conversely remarkably unintelligent. Lacking another person to compete with — internet multiplayer exists in most titles in the collection, but rather basic in functionality — the experience will be incomplete.

Technical Presentation

The two dozen available combat games in the anthology, a mix of coin-op, home system, and portable titles, are accurately emulated, though I have noticed a handful slight anomalies — mainly control latency and sporadic glitches, notably within Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are largely presented as-is, the development team has incorporated various clever user experience improvements and visual presentation options. For example, you can choose to show each character's special moves on the display and choose to enable unlimited duration to execute finishing moves. There are also options for revealing concealed combatants, without having to perform some esoteric trick to obtain them.

Artistically, the releases can be played with a variety of visual enhancements and presentation styles. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection includes remarkably accurate filters that mimic the traditional television screens of coin-op establishments or home televisions, or the limited color monitor of a Game Boy. A notably appreciated element is the choice to enable coin-op-inspired frames framing the gameplay, with your selected Mortal Kombat title precisely and gently mirroring against the artificial ebony plastic frames. It's very artistically charming.

Extra Content

The collection includes numerous nice touches beyond the historical footage and recreated vintage titles, including a music player that lets you revisit the music from multiple Mortal Kombat games without the din of combatants violently defeating each other. There are also combatant descriptions that include bios and multiple story elements displayed via the demo sequences of coin-op titles and conclusions.

Lost Media Recovery

Among the most significant features for hardcore Mortal Kombat fans is the opportunity to play a piece of "lost media" in the format of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This particular edition, a slightly updated version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an pioneering effort from the developer at one-on-one internet-based play in coin-op establishments. The Wavenet Edition of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but provided the ability to battle network competitors and contained several small bug fixes and balance. However, this network version didn't find widespread adoption, in part