🔗 Share this article

This iconic fighting game continues to hold its share of secrets and the capacity to surprise, more than 30 years after its initial debut in gaming halls. The recent anthology spanning the franchise's earliest days, featuring a quartet of arcade releases, multiple console adaptations, and related titles, is more than just a well-emulated series of classics along with lesser-known entries — it additionally serves as a comprehensive historical account about the development of the iconic franchise.

Even as a lifelong enthusiast of the series who has closely monitored its creation and evolution, there was plenty new for me to learn and appreciate about the series.

What Makes the Legacy Collection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection similar to other vintage game anthologies from the creators at Digital Eclipse, portion educational film, portion interactive museum. This compilation features simulated releases of the pioneering 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 franchise's attempts at derivative games, like action-oriented titles Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — among the series' most criticized releases.

The Legacy Kollection is therefore not a highlight reel anthology, but a study of Mortal Kombat's early days, when developer Midway and series co-creators Ed Boon and John Tobias were discovering methods to make a fighting game, created from video recordings of real actors, through experimentation. Viewing the historical footage — which includes historical videos, recent conversations, and scans of old flyers, graphic novels, and even interoffice faxes — it's remarkable to see how Mortal Kombat went from humble beginnings to a international craze. It's frankly astounding to observe several pioneering developers, working with minimal planning or guidance, direct their entertainment passions into birthing an iconic game franchise.

Documentary Portion

The educational segment of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection documents the ascent of Mortal Kombat and the developers' professional journeys at the currently closed Midway. It further illustrates how the very same individuals reckoned with how to consistently surpass their achievements, experiencing considerable pressure to repeat their success. It serves as a compelling period piece composed of VHS tapes and film-based pictures and pencil sketches, which demonstrate the hands-on approach of the franchise's production method and how word of mouth helped circulate its mysteries and undisclosed elements of the series in its peak period in gaming halls. Told in bite-sized chunks, it's thoroughly enjoyable set of brief historical films that covers video games, graphic novels, movies and even the silly live-action tour. The compilation also contains some never-implemented techniques and digital fighter representations among its previously unreleased material.

Interactive Experience

Placed within the five-segment historical film's chronology are prompts to play the games themselves. At certain intervals, audience members can jump into a game of Mortal Kombat or a console adaptation to rediscover its combat system and graphics, recreated with impressive accuracy on current technology.

I dedicated most of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, especially Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Many of the games here stand the test of time, particularly during local multiplayer matches. Yet competing with the artificial intelligence fighters in these releases is a demonstration of how basic and unbalanced the development approached in the franchise's pioneering releases. CPU-controlled opponents obviously use unfair advantages or are conversely remarkably unintelligent. If you don't have a human opponent — internet multiplayer exists in numerous anthology releases, but too light on features — the experience will be incomplete.

Visual Options

The 23 playable Mortal Kombat games in the anthology, a mix of arcade, console, and handheld games, are faithfully recreated, though I detected a few small quirks — mainly control latency and the occasional bug, particularly in Mortal Kombat 4. Although the titles are mostly shown in their original form, the creators has incorporated various clever quality-of-life features and visual presentation options. For example, players have the option to reveal combatant-unique actions during gameplay and choose to enable endless periods to execute finishing moves. There are also options for accessing hidden fighters, without having to perform obscure techniques 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 traditional television screens of gaming halls or household displays, or the greenscale screen of a portable gaming device. An especially welcome feature is the option to have coin-op-inspired frames encircling the display, with your selected Mortal Kombat title accurately and softly reflecting against the simulated dark plastic edges. It's remarkably visually appealing.

Additional Features

There are plenty of appreciated elements beyond the educational material and simulated classic games, containing a soundtrack mode that allows users to rediscover the music from multiple fighting releases absent the noise of two kombatants viciously slaughtering each other. Also present are character profiles that include bios and the various bits of lore shown through the demo sequences of coin-op titles and endings.

Historical Preservation

A particularly notable inclusion for hardcore Mortal Kombat fans is the ability to access a segment of previously unavailable content 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 pioneering effort from the developer at direct online competitive gaming in coin-op establishments. This network version of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but provided the ability to compete against internet adversaries and contained several small glitch repairs and refinements. However, this network version failed to achieve popularity, in part