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This iconic fighting game retains its share of secrets and the capacity to surprise, more than 30 years after its original launch in coin-op establishments. A new collection covering the brand's formative years, which includes a quartet of arcade releases, several home system versions, and spinoffs, is more than just a well-emulated set of legendary games including less celebrated releases — it functions as a rich documentary about the creation of the iconic franchise.

Being a long-time Mortal Kombat fan who has carefully followed its development and progression, there was much to discover for me to discover and admire about the series.

What Constitutes the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection similar to previous classic compilations from the development team Digital Eclipse, part historical documentation, part playable archive. The collection includes emulated versions of the original arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, along with home system and portable adaptations of some of those games. The anthology additionally contains the brand's experiments at derivative games, like action-oriented titles Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — among the series' least successful installments.

The Legacy Kollection consequently doesn't represent a “best of” collection, but an exploration into the franchise's initial era, when the development team Midway and franchise originators the visionary developers were discovering methods to create a combat title, digitized from footage of actual people, on the fly. Observing the archival material — which includes historical videos, recent conversations, and scans of old flyers, illustrated stories, and including internal communications — it's incredible to witness how Mortal Kombat went from modest origins to a worldwide phenomenon. It's truly remarkable to watch a handful of early video game creators, developing without clear direction or supervision, direct their entertainment passions into birthing an iconic game franchise.

Historical Section

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection traces the growth of the combat franchise and the founders' vocational paths at the now-defunct Midway. It then goes on to show how these identical developers contended with how to routinely one-up themselves, encountering significant stress to duplicate their achievements. It represents an intriguing historical record constructed using video recordings and analog photographs and manual drawings, which reveal the self-made character of Mortal Kombat's development and how oral tradition helped disseminate its secrets and hidden aspects of Mortal Kombat in its arcade heyday. Told in bite-sized chunks, it's an eminently watchable series of documentary shorts that includes titles, illustrated stories, cinematic adaptations and including the humorous real-world tour. The compilation also contains some unused moves and character sprites among its cutting-room-floor content.

Interactive Gaming

Distributed throughout the five-part documentary's timeline are prompts to play the original releases. At certain intervals, audience members can jump into a game of Mortal Kombat or a console adaptation to reexperience its mechanics and artistic style, emulated nearly perfectly on contemporary systems.

I dedicated most of my time playing the arcade classics, specifically Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Numerous titles here remain enjoyable, notably with one-on-one local play. But playing against the aforementioned game's AI-controlled opponents is a demonstration of how basic and unbalanced the coding existed in the series' initial installments. AI-managed characters obviously use unfair advantages or are otherwise dumb as rocks. If you don't have another person to compete with — online play is available in most titles in the collection, but too light on features — you'll miss the full enjoyment.

Technical Presentation

The 23 playable Mortal Kombat games in the compilation, a combination of gaming hall, television, and mobile releases, are faithfully recreated, though I detected a handful slight anomalies — mainly control latency and intermittent errors, notably within Mortal Kombat 4. And while the games are primarily displayed authentically, developer Digital Eclipse has included some smart quality-of-life features and visual presentation options. For example, you can choose to show each character's special moves on-screen and opt to have infinite time to complete lethal techniques. Also included are choices for revealing concealed combatants, eliminating the need to execute some esoteric trick to obtain them.

Artistically, the releases can be enjoyed with multiple visual enhancements and presentation styles. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection offers very realistic options that simulate the cathode-ray tube displays of gaming halls or home televisions, or the monochrome green display of a portable gaming device. An especially welcome feature is the choice to enable gaming hall-style borders framing the gameplay, with your selected Mortal Kombat title precisely and gently mirroring against the simulated dark plastic edges. It's very artistically charming.

Bonus Elements

The collection includes numerous nice touches beyond the educational material and simulated classic games, featuring an audio component that lets you revisit the tunes of various Mortal Kombat games absent the noise of fighters brutally eliminating opponents. Also present are character profiles that include bios and the various bits of lore presented by the demo sequences of coin-op titles and endings.

Archival Discovery

A particularly notable inclusion for committed franchise followers is the chance to experience a segment of previously unavailable content in the guise of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This specific release, a moderately improved edition of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an initial venture by the company at one-on-one internet-based play in arcades. The online-enabled release of the game is virtually identical to UMK3, but included the option to compete against internet adversaries and included some minor error corrections and adjustments. However, this network version never gained traction, in part