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Mortal Kombat continues to hold its share of secrets and the capacity to surprise, well past its 30th anniversary after its original launch in arcades. The recent anthology covering the franchise's earliest days, which includes four original arcade titles, several home system versions, and derivative games, transcends simply a faithfully reproduced series of classics along with lesser-known entries — it's also a comprehensive historical account about the making of the legendary series.

Being a long-time enthusiast of the series who has paid close attention its creation and evolution, there was plenty new for me to understand and value about the series.

What Makes the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection comparable to other vintage game anthologies from the creators at Digital Eclipse, portion educational film, portion interactive museum. 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 franchise's attempts at spinoffs, like action games Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — some of the brand's worst entries.

The Legacy Kollection thus isn't a greatest hits compilation, but a study of Mortal Kombat's early days, when the creators at Midway and brand founders Ed Boon and John Tobias were discovering methods to make a fighting game, produced using film material of live performers, through experimentation. Viewing the historical footage — containing vintage recordings, contemporary discussions, and digital copies of vintage posters, comics, and even company memos — it's incredible to witness how the series transformed from simple starts to a global sensation. It's truly remarkable to see a group of young game developers, developing without clear direction or supervision, channel their pop-culture interests into birthing an iconic game franchise.

Educational Component

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection documents the ascent of Mortal Kombat and the developers' professional journeys at the currently closed Midway. It subsequently demonstrates how these identical developers contended with how to consistently surpass their achievements, encountering significant pressure to repeat their achievements. It serves as a compelling period piece composed of analog films and analog photographs and hand-drawn illustrations, which reveal the self-made character of Mortal Kombat's development and how personal recommendations helped circulate its mysteries and hidden aspects of Mortal Kombat in its golden era in coin-op establishments. Delivered in easily digestible portions, it's an eminently watchable collection of mini-documentaries that covers video games, graphic novels, movies and including the humorous real-world tour. The collection additionally features some unreleased actions and game character images among its archived development assets.

Playable Component

Interspersed along the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are prompts to play the actual titles. During specific moments, viewers can hop into a Mortal Kombat title or one of its home console ports to reexperience its mechanics and graphics, simulated with remarkable precision on modern hardware.

I dedicated most of my time playing the arcade classics, especially Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Numerous titles here remain enjoyable, particularly during local multiplayer matches. But playing against the artificial intelligence fighters in these releases is a demonstration of how basic and unfair the coding existed in the franchise's pioneering releases. CPU-controlled opponents obviously use unfair advantages or are conversely remarkably unintelligent. 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 be missing out.

Display Features

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the collection, a blend of arcade, console, and handheld games, are faithfully recreated, though I've observed a couple minor issues — mainly control latency and sporadic glitches, particularly in Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are largely presented as-is, the creators has included some smart quality-of-life features and display customization choices. For example, you can choose to display fighter-specific techniques on the display and choose to enable unlimited duration to execute finishing moves. Also included are choices for revealing concealed combatants, without having to perform some esoteric trick to access them.

Graphically, the titles can be experienced with numerous visual enhancements and presentation styles. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection provides highly authentic effects that reproduce the cathode-ray tube displays of arcades or home televisions, or the monochrome green display of a Nintendo handheld. 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 faux black plastic borders. It's remarkably visually appealing.

Bonus Elements

The collection includes numerous welcome features besides the educational material and simulated classic games, featuring an audio component that lets you revisit the tunes of various Mortal Kombat games excluding the sounds of fighters brutally eliminating opponents. Additionally included are fighter biographies that contain backgrounds and numerous narrative components presented by arcade games' attract mode screens and conclusions.

Historical Preservation

Among the most significant features for dedicated series enthusiasts is the ability to access a segment of previously unavailable content in the format of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This particular edition, a somewhat revised iteration of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an early attempt by Midway at head-to-head network battles in gaming halls. This network version of the game is practically indistinguishable to UMK3, but provided the ability to compete against internet adversaries and contained several small error corrections and adjustments. But the Wavenet update failed to achieve popularity, in part