🔗 Share this article

Mortal Kombat retains its share of secrets and the capacity to surprise, well past its 30th anniversary after its original launch in gaming halls. A new collection covering the brand's formative years, comprising four original arcade titles, various home ports, and spinoffs, transcends simply a faithfully reproduced collection of iconic titles along with lesser-known entries — it additionally serves as a comprehensive historical account about the creation of the renowned brand.

As a dedicated enthusiast of the series who has carefully followed its creation and evolution, there was much to discover for me to understand and value about the series.

What Constitutes the Legacy Collection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection similar to previous classic compilations from the development team Digital Eclipse, part documentary, part playable archive. The anthology contains emulated versions of the original arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, plus console and handheld ports of certain releases. The anthology additionally contains the brand's experiments at spin-off titles, like action games 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 an exploration into Mortal Kombat's early days, when the development team Midway and brand founders the visionary developers were figuring out how to make a fighting game, created from video recordings of live performers, as they went along. Viewing the historical footage — which includes historical videos, new interviews, and reproductions of classic advertisements, illustrated stories, and including internal communications — it's incredible to witness how the franchise evolved from humble beginnings to a international craze. It's genuinely amazing to watch a handful of pioneering developers, working with minimal planning or guidance, channel their pop-culture interests into creating a legendary video game series.

Historical Section

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection charts the rise of the fighting series and its creators' careers at the currently closed Midway. It then goes on to show how those same creators reckoned with how to consistently surpass their achievements, encountering significant stress to duplicate their triumphs. It represents an intriguing historical record made from video recordings and traditional photos and pencil sketches, which reveal the self-made character of the franchise's production method and how personal recommendations helped disseminate its secrets and undisclosed elements of the series in its golden era in coin-op establishments. Delivered in easily digestible portions, it's an eminently watchable collection of mini-documentaries that includes titles, illustrated stories, cinematic adaptations and including the humorous real-world tour. It also includes some unreleased actions and game character images among its archived development assets.

Interactive Gaming

Interspersed along the five-segment historical film's chronology are invitations to experience the actual titles. At certain intervals, users can directly access a combat game session or a console adaptation to revisit its gameplay and artistic style, recreated with impressive accuracy on current technology.

I dedicated most of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, specifically Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Many of the games here hold up, especially in local multiplayer matches. But playing against the computer-controlled adversaries in these titles is a testament to how primitive and unjust the coding existed in the franchise's pioneering releases. AI-managed characters clearly employ dishonest tactics or are otherwise dumb as rocks. Without having someone to play against — internet multiplayer exists in numerous anthology releases, but too light on features — you'll miss the full enjoyment.

Technical Presentation

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the collection, a blend of coin-op, home system, and portable titles, are precisely simulated, though I've observed a couple minor issues — mainly control latency and sporadic glitches, particularly in Mortal Kombat 4. Although the titles are largely presented as-is, the development team has added several intelligent user experience improvements and graphical adjustment settings. For instance, you can choose to display fighter-specific techniques on-screen and select to activate infinite time to complete lethal techniques. There are also options for unlocking secret characters, eliminating the need to execute some esoteric trick to obtain them.

Graphically, the titles can be enjoyed with multiple visual enhancements and presentation styles. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection provides highly authentic effects that reproduce the cathode-ray tube displays of arcades or domestic TVs, or the monochrome green display of a Nintendo handheld. A particularly nice touch is the setting to activate coin-op-inspired frames encircling the display, with your selected Mortal Kombat title faithfully and subtly duplicating against the artificial ebony plastic frames. It's quite aesthetically pleasing.

Additional Features

There are plenty of nice touches beyond the documentary and emulated arcade classics, containing a soundtrack mode that allows users to rediscover the music from multiple combat titles absent the noise of two kombatants viciously slaughtering each other. Additionally included are fighter biographies that feature histories and numerous narrative components shown through the demo sequences of coin-op titles and final sequences.

Lost Media Recovery

Among the most significant features for dedicated series enthusiasts is the ability to access a piece of "lost media" in the form of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This specific release, a somewhat revised iteration of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an early attempt by Midway at head-to-head network battles in arcades. The online-enabled release of the game is virtually identical to UMK3, but featured the capability to battle network competitors and featured various slight glitch repairs and refinements. But the Wavenet update never gained traction, in part