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The Mortal Kombat series retains its share of secrets and the power to astonish, over three decades after its initial debut in arcades. This latest compilation covering the franchise's earliest days, featuring a quartet of arcade releases, various home ports, and related titles, transcends simply a faithfully reproduced set of legendary games and not-so-classics — it's also a comprehensive historical account about the making of the iconic franchise.

Being a long-time enthusiast of the series who has closely monitored its creation and evolution, there was much to discover for me to discover and admire about the series.

What Makes the Legacy Collection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection similar to other retro collections from the development team Digital Eclipse, part documentary, part playable archive. This compilation features simulated releases of the pioneering 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 series' ventures at spin-off titles, like combat-focused releases Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — two of the franchise's most criticized releases.

The Legacy Kollection thus isn't a “best of” collection, but an examination of the franchise's initial era, when developer Midway and franchise originators the creative duo behind the series were figuring out how to create a combat title, created from video recordings of actual people, as they went along. Viewing the historical footage — containing vintage recordings, contemporary discussions, and reproductions of classic advertisements, illustrated stories, and including internal communications — it's astonishing to observe how the series transformed from modest origins to a worldwide phenomenon. It's frankly astounding to watch a handful of young game developers, working with minimal planning or oversight, focus their cultural enthusiasms into establishing an enduring gaming brand.

Educational Component

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection traces the growth of the fighting series and the founders' vocational paths at the now-defunct Midway. It subsequently demonstrates how these identical developers reckoned with how to regularly outdo their previous work, facing no small amount of stress to duplicate their triumphs. It serves as a compelling period piece composed of VHS tapes and film-based pictures and hand-drawn illustrations, which reveal the self-made character of Mortal Kombat's development and how word of mouth helped disseminate its secrets and hidden aspects of Mortal Kombat in its peak period in gaming halls. Presented in manageable segments, it's highly engaging collection of mini-documentaries that covers video games, graphic novels, movies and including the humorous real-world tour. The compilation also contains some unused moves and game character images among its previously unreleased material.

Interactive Gaming

Distributed throughout the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are prompts to play the original releases. During specific moments, audience members can jump into a combat game session or one of its home console ports to reexperience its mechanics and artistic style, emulated nearly perfectly on modern hardware.

I allocated the majority of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, especially Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Several releases here remain enjoyable, especially in direct competitive sessions. But playing against the computer-controlled adversaries in these titles is a testament to how primitive and unjust the programming was in early Mortal Kombat games. Computer-directed fighters blatantly cheat to win or are otherwise dumb as rocks. Without having someone to play against — network gaming is included in the majority of included games, but too light on features — the experience will be incomplete.

Technical Presentation

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the collection, a mix of coin-op, home system, and portable titles, are faithfully recreated, though I've observed a couple minor issues — mostly input lag and intermittent errors, particularly in Mortal Kombat 4. Although the titles are largely presented as-is, the development team has added several intelligent user experience improvements and display customization choices. For instance, you can choose to show each character's special moves during gameplay and select to activate infinite time to complete lethal techniques. Additionally available are settings for accessing hidden fighters, eliminating the need to execute some esoteric trick to unlock them.

Graphically, the titles can be experienced with numerous graphical effects and display options. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection includes remarkably accurate options that simulate the traditional television screens of gaming halls or household displays, or the monochrome green display of a Game Boy. A particularly nice touch is the setting to activate arcade-like bezels encircling the display, with the MK game of your choice faithfully and subtly duplicating against the faux black plastic borders. It's quite aesthetically pleasing.

Additional Features

The collection includes numerous nice touches beyond the historical footage and recreated vintage titles, containing a soundtrack mode that lets you revisit the tunes of various combat titles absent the noise of two kombatants viciously slaughtering each other. There are also character profiles that contain backgrounds and the various bits of lore shown through arcade games' attract mode screens and final sequences.

Historical Preservation

A particularly notable inclusion for dedicated series enthusiasts is the chance to experience a segment of previously unavailable content in the form of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This specific release, a slightly updated version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an pioneering effort from the developer at direct online competitive gaming 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 error corrections and adjustments. Yet this online edition never gained traction, in part