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The Mortal Kombat series retains its share of secrets and the power to astonish, more than 30 years after its original launch in arcades. A new collection spanning the series' initial period, which includes four arcade games, various home ports, and spinoffs, goes beyond just a well-emulated set of legendary games and not-so-classics — it's also a rich documentary about the creation of the iconic franchise.

Being a long-time devotee of the franchise who has carefully followed its creation and evolution, there was plenty new for me to understand and value about the series.

What Constitutes the Legacy Collection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection similar to previous classic compilations from the development team Digital Eclipse, portion educational film, part playable archive. The anthology contains emulated versions 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 spin-off titles, like action-oriented titles Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — some of the brand's least successful installments.

The Legacy Kollection thus isn't a “best of” collection, but an exploration into the franchise's initial era, when the creators at Midway and brand founders Ed Boon and John Tobias were discovering methods to create a combat title, digitized from footage of real actors, as they went along. Watching the documentary — containing historical videos, contemporary discussions, and reproductions of classic advertisements, illustrated stories, and even company memos — it's astonishing to observe how the series transformed from modest origins to a global sensation. It's truly remarkable to observe several pioneering developers, working with minimal planning or supervision, channel their pop-culture interests into birthing an iconic game franchise.

Documentary Portion

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection documents the ascent of Mortal Kombat and its creators' careers at the now-defunct Midway. It then goes on to show how these identical developers contended with how to consistently surpass their achievements, encountering significant stress to duplicate their achievements. It represents an intriguing historical record made from VHS tapes and traditional photos and hand-drawn illustrations, which demonstrate the hands-on approach of the series' creation process and how oral tradition helped circulate its mysteries and hidden aspects of Mortal Kombat in its golden era in coin-op establishments. Presented in manageable segments, it's highly engaging set of brief historical films that spans games, comics, films and including the humorous real-world tour. It also includes some never-implemented techniques and character sprites among its archived development assets.

Interactive Experience

Placed within the five-segment historical film's chronology are prompts to play the original releases. At various points, audience members can jump into a game of Mortal Kombat or a console adaptation to reexperience its mechanics and visual presentation, emulated nearly perfectly on contemporary systems.

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 hold up, especially in local multiplayer matches. But playing against the computer-controlled adversaries in these titles is a demonstration of how basic and unbalanced the coding existed in the series' initial installments. Computer-directed fighters blatantly cheat to win or are alternatively incredibly stupid. Without having a human opponent — network gaming is included in most titles in the collection, but too light on features — you'll be missing out.

Visual Options

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the anthology, a blend of arcade, console, and handheld games, are accurately emulated, though I detected a handful slight anomalies — mainly control latency and sporadic glitches, particularly in Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are primarily displayed authentically, the development team has included some smart user experience improvements and visual presentation options. As an illustration, users can elect to reveal combatant-unique actions on the display and choose to enable endless periods to perform a Fatality. Also included are choices for revealing concealed combatants, removing the requirement to complete obscure techniques to access them.

Graphically, the titles can be experienced with numerous filters and visual treatments. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection includes remarkably accurate effects that reproduce the traditional television screens of gaming halls or household displays, or the monochrome green display of a Nintendo handheld. An especially welcome feature is the choice to enable coin-op-inspired frames framing the gameplay, with the MK game of your choice faithfully and subtly duplicating against the simulated dark plastic edges. It's quite aesthetically pleasing.

Extra Content

Players will discover multiple appreciated elements beyond the documentary and emulated arcade classics, containing a soundtrack mode that lets you revisit the music from multiple fighting releases excluding the sounds of combatants violently defeating each other. Also present are character profiles that include bios and the various bits of lore displayed via arcade games' attract mode screens 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 version of the game, a somewhat revised iteration of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an early attempt by Midway at one-on-one internet-based play in gaming halls. This network version of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but provided the ability to battle network competitors and featured various slight bug fixes and balance. However, this network version never gained traction, in part