🔗 Share this article

This iconic fighting game still possesses many hidden mysteries and the ability to amaze, over three decades after its original launch in arcades. The recent anthology covering the brand's formative years, featuring a quartet of arcade releases, several home system versions, and spinoffs, is more than only a accurately simulated collection of iconic titles along with lesser-known entries — it's also a comprehensive historical account about the development of the renowned brand.

As a dedicated devotee of the franchise who has carefully followed its origins and transformation, there was plenty new for me to learn and appreciate about the series.

What Constitutes the Historical Compilation

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like previous classic compilations from developer Digital Eclipse, part documentary, portion interactive museum. The collection includes emulated versions of the pioneering arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, along with home system and portable adaptations of several of these titles. The anthology additionally contains the series' ventures at spinoffs, like combat-focused releases 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 highlight reel anthology, but an exploration into the franchise's initial era, when the development team Midway and brand founders the creative duo behind the series were determining how to make a fighting game, created from video recordings of actual people, through experimentation. Observing the archival material — which includes historical videos, recent conversations, and scans of old flyers, comics, and even interoffice faxes — it's incredible to witness how Mortal Kombat went from modest origins to a global sensation. It's genuinely amazing to see a group of early video game creators, developing without clear direction or supervision, channel their pop-culture interests into creating a legendary video game series.

Documentary Portion

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection documents the ascent of the fighting series and the developers' professional journeys at the no-longer-operating Midway. It then goes on to show how these identical developers contended with how to regularly outdo their previous work, experiencing considerable stress to duplicate their achievements. It represents an intriguing historical record composed of VHS tapes and analog photographs and hand-drawn illustrations, which showcase the DIY nature of the series' creation process and how personal recommendations helped disseminate its secrets and secrets of MK in its golden era in coin-op establishments. Presented in manageable segments, it's an eminently watchable collection of mini-documentaries that spans games, comics, films and even the silly live-action tour. It also includes some never-implemented techniques and game character images among its previously unreleased material.

Interactive Gaming

Distributed throughout the five-part documentary's timeline are prompts to play the games themselves. At various points, users can directly access a combat game session or a home system version to rediscover its combat system and artistic style, simulated with remarkable precision on current technology.

I allocated the majority of my time experiencing the original arcade titles, particularly Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Several releases here hold up, especially in local multiplayer matches. But playing against the computer-controlled adversaries in these titles is a demonstration of how basic and unfair the coding existed in the series' initial installments. AI-managed characters blatantly cheat to win or are otherwise dumb as rocks. Lacking someone to play against — network gaming is included in the majority of included games, but rather basic in functionality — the experience will be incomplete.

Technical Presentation

The two dozen available combat games in the compilation, a mix of arcade, console, and handheld games, are faithfully recreated, though I've observed a handful slight anomalies — mostly input lag and intermittent errors, notably within Mortal Kombat 4. Although the titles are largely presented as-is, developer Digital Eclipse has included some smart quality-of-life features and visual presentation options. For instance, users can elect to show each character's special moves on the display and select to activate endless periods to perform a Fatality. There are also options for accessing hidden fighters, without having to perform obscure techniques to unlock them.

Graphically, the titles can be experienced with numerous filters and visual treatments. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection offers very realistic filters that mimic the traditional television screens of arcades or household displays, or the greenscale screen of a Game Boy. A particularly nice touch is the setting to activate arcade-like bezels framing the gameplay, with your selected Mortal Kombat title accurately and softly reflecting against the simulated dark plastic edges. It's quite aesthetically pleasing.

Additional Features

The collection includes numerous nice touches beyond the educational material and simulated classic games, featuring an audio component that enables players to reexperience the music from multiple fighting releases excluding the sounds of two kombatants viciously slaughtering each other. There are also character profiles that contain backgrounds and the various bits of lore shown through the demo sequences of coin-op titles and endings.

Archival Discovery

A particularly notable inclusion for committed franchise followers is the chance to experience a segment of previously unavailable content in the form of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This particular edition, a moderately improved edition of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an initial venture by the company at one-on-one internet-based play in coin-op establishments. The Wavenet Edition of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but included the option to battle network competitors and featured various slight bug fixes and balance. However, this network version never gained traction, in part