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The Mortal Kombat series still possesses numerous undisclosed elements and the capacity to surprise, more than 30 years after its initial debut in arcades. A new collection covering the franchise's earliest days, which includes four original arcade titles, various home ports, and derivative games, goes beyond just a well-emulated series of classics and not-so-classics — it additionally serves as a rich documentary about the creation of the iconic franchise.

As a dedicated Mortal Kombat fan who has closely monitored its origins and transformation, there was numerous fresh aspects for me to discover and admire about the series.

What Makes the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection comparable to other retro collections from the creators at Digital Eclipse, portion educational film, part playable archive. The collection includes digitally recreated editions of the pioneering arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, including television and mobile versions of certain releases. This compilation also features the brand's experiments at spinoffs, like action-oriented titles Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — some of the brand's most criticized releases.

The Legacy Kollection consequently doesn't represent a “best of” collection, but an examination of the series' formative period, when the development team Midway and series co-creators the visionary developers were determining how to make a fighting game, created from video recordings of real actors, through experimentation. Watching the documentary — which includes vintage recordings, new interviews, and digital copies of vintage posters, comics, and even interoffice faxes — it's astonishing to observe how Mortal Kombat went from humble beginnings to a worldwide phenomenon. It's genuinely amazing to watch a handful of pioneering 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 traces the growth of the fighting series and the developers' professional journeys at the now-defunct Midway. It further illustrates how the very same individuals addressed how to regularly outdo their previous work, facing no small amount of pressure to repeat their achievements. It serves as a compelling period piece composed of VHS tapes and film-based pictures and manual drawings, which showcase the DIY nature of the franchise's production method and how personal recommendations helped disseminate its secrets and hidden aspects of Mortal Kombat in its golden era in coin-op establishments. Presented in manageable segments, it's thoroughly enjoyable collection of mini-documentaries that includes titles, illustrated stories, cinematic adaptations and even the comical physical events. It also includes some unused moves and character sprites among its cutting-room-floor content.

Playable Component

Distributed throughout the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are opportunities to engage with the original releases. At various points, viewers can hop into a game of Mortal Kombat 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, particularly Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Numerous titles here hold up, notably with local multiplayer matches. However, facing the aforementioned game's AI-controlled opponents is a testament to how primitive and unbalanced the programming was in the series' initial installments. Computer-directed fighters clearly employ dishonest tactics or are conversely remarkably unintelligent. Without having another person to compete with — network gaming is included in most titles in the collection, but rather basic in functionality — you'll miss the full enjoyment.

Visual Options

The two dozen available combat games in the collection, a mix of gaming hall, television, and mobile releases, are accurately emulated, though I detected a handful slight anomalies — mainly control latency and intermittent errors, notably within Mortal Kombat 4. Although the titles are largely presented as-is, developer Digital Eclipse has incorporated various clever quality-of-life features and display customization choices. For instance, you can choose to display fighter-specific techniques on-screen and opt to have unlimited duration to complete lethal techniques. There are also options for unlocking secret characters, removing the requirement to complete some esoteric trick to unlock them.

Visually, the games can be experienced with numerous graphical effects and display options. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection includes remarkably accurate effects that reproduce the CRT monitors of gaming halls or household displays, or the monochrome green display of a Game Boy. An especially welcome feature is the option to have gaming hall-style borders framing the gameplay, with the specific combat game you're playing faithfully and subtly duplicating against the faux black plastic borders. It's very artistically charming.

Additional Features

The collection includes numerous nice touches beyond the historical footage and recreated vintage titles, containing a soundtrack mode that enables players to reexperience the tunes of various Mortal Kombat games without the din of combatants violently defeating each other. Also present are character profiles that include bios and the various bits of lore shown through the idle displays of gaming hall releases and endings.

Archival Discovery

A particularly notable inclusion for dedicated series enthusiasts is the ability to access a piece of "lost media" in the guise 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 one-on-one internet-based play in arcades. This network version of the game is practically indistinguishable to UMK3, but included the option to compete against internet adversaries and contained several small bug fixes and balance. Yet this online edition failed to achieve popularity, in part