🔗 Share this article

This iconic fighting game continues to hold many hidden mysteries and the power to astonish, over three decades after its first appearance in coin-op establishments. The recent anthology spanning the franchise's earliest days, which includes four original arcade titles, several home system versions, and related titles, transcends only a accurately simulated series of classics including less celebrated releases — it functions as a comprehensive historical account about the creation of the legendary series.

Even as a lifelong devotee of the franchise who has paid close attention its creation and evolution, there was numerous fresh aspects for me to learn and appreciate about the series.

What Defines the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection comparable to previous classic compilations from the development team Digital Eclipse, portion educational film, section playable historical record. The collection includes emulated versions of the original arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, including television and mobile versions of certain releases. The anthology additionally contains the series' ventures at derivative games, like combat-focused releases 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 a study of Mortal Kombat's early days, when the development team Midway and series co-creators the visionary developers were determining how to develop a battle series, digitized from footage of actual people, on the fly. Watching the documentary — which includes vintage recordings, new interviews, and scans of old flyers, illustrated stories, and including internal communications — it's incredible to witness how the series transformed from modest origins to a international craze. It's frankly astounding to watch a handful of early video game creators, operating with virtually no plan or oversight, focus their cultural enthusiasms into creating a legendary video game series.

Historical Section

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection documents the ascent of the fighting series and the developers' professional journeys at the now-defunct Midway. It then goes on to show how those same creators reckoned with how to routinely one-up themselves, encountering significant pressure to repeat their achievements. It serves as a compelling period piece made from video recordings and film-based pictures and pencil sketches, which reveal the self-made character of the series' creation process and how word of mouth helped spread its rumors and undisclosed elements of the series in its arcade heyday. Told in bite-sized chunks, it's highly engaging set of brief historical films that covers video games, graphic novels, movies and including the humorous real-world tour. The compilation also contains some never-implemented techniques and character sprites among its previously unreleased material.

Interactive Experience

Interspersed along the five-part documentary's timeline are opportunities to engage with the actual titles. At various points, audience members can jump into a combat game session or one of its home console ports to rediscover its combat system and artistic style, recreated with impressive accuracy on modern hardware.

I spent the bulk of my time playing the arcade classics, specifically Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Many of the games here hold up, notably with one-on-one local play. Yet competing with the artificial intelligence fighters in these releases is a demonstration of how basic and unbalanced the coding existed in early Mortal Kombat games. Computer-directed fighters blatantly cheat to win or are conversely remarkably unintelligent. Without having another person to compete with — internet multiplayer exists in numerous anthology releases, but too light on features — you'll be missing out.

Technical Presentation

The two dozen available combat games in the collection, a mix of gaming hall, television, and mobile releases, are faithfully recreated, though I detected a couple minor issues — mostly input lag and sporadic glitches, especially with Mortal Kombat 4. And while the games are primarily displayed authentically, the development team has added several intelligent convenience enhancements and graphical adjustment settings. For example, users can elect to show each character's special moves on the display and choose to enable infinite time to complete lethal techniques. Additionally available are settings for unlocking secret characters, eliminating the need to execute complicated methods to obtain them.

Graphically, the titles can be enjoyed with multiple visual enhancements and presentation styles. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection provides highly authentic options that simulate the traditional television screens of gaming halls or domestic TVs, or the greenscale screen of a Game Boy. A notably appreciated element is the option to have gaming hall-style borders surrounding the screen, with the MK game of your choice accurately and softly reflecting against the faux black plastic borders. It's very artistically charming.

Extra Content

Players will discover multiple nice touches beyond the documentary and emulated arcade classics, including a music player that enables players to reexperience the tunes of various fighting releases absent the noise of combatants violently defeating each other. Also present are combatant descriptions that include bios and the various bits of lore presented by arcade games' attract mode screens and final sequences.

Historical Preservation

One of the biggest highlights for hardcore Mortal Kombat fans is the chance to experience a piece of "lost media" in the format of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This specific release, a slightly updated version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an early attempt by Midway at direct online competitive gaming in arcades. The online-enabled release of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but featured the capability to challenge online opponents and contained several small error corrections and adjustments. But the Wavenet update failed to achieve popularity, in part