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This iconic fighting game retains numerous undisclosed elements and the ability to amaze, over three decades after its original launch in arcades. A new collection covering the brand's formative years, comprising four arcade games, multiple console adaptations, and spinoffs, goes beyond only a accurately simulated set of legendary games including less celebrated releases — it's also a detailed chronicle about the making of the iconic franchise.

Being a long-time Mortal Kombat fan who has carefully followed its development and progression, there was much to discover for me to understand and value about the series.

What Defines the Legacy Collection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like other retro collections from the development team Digital Eclipse, part historical documentation, portion interactive museum. The collection includes simulated releases of the first arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, including television and mobile versions of several of these titles. The collection even includes the brand's experiments at spin-off titles, like action games 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 exploration into the series' formative period, when the creators at Midway and series co-creators Ed Boon and John Tobias were figuring out how to make a fighting game, produced using film material of real actors, on the fly. Viewing the historical footage — that features archival footage, recent conversations, and scans of old flyers, graphic novels, and even company memos — it's incredible to witness how Mortal Kombat went from humble beginnings to a worldwide phenomenon. It's genuinely amazing to watch a handful of early video game creators, developing without clear direction or guidance, direct their entertainment passions into birthing an iconic game franchise.

Educational Component

The historical documentation of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection charts the rise of the combat franchise and the founders' vocational paths at the no-longer-operating Midway. It subsequently demonstrates how these identical developers addressed how to routinely one-up themselves, experiencing considerable demand to replicate their success. It represents an intriguing historical record composed of VHS tapes and analog photographs and hand-drawn illustrations, which reveal the self-made character of the series' creation process and how oral tradition helped spread its rumors and hidden aspects of Mortal Kombat in its golden era in coin-op establishments. Told in bite-sized chunks, it's thoroughly enjoyable set of brief historical films that includes titles, illustrated stories, cinematic adaptations and even the comical physical events. The collection additionally features some unused moves and digital fighter representations among its archived development assets.

Playable Component

Distributed throughout the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are invitations to experience the games themselves. During specific moments, viewers can hop into a game of Mortal Kombat or a home system version to rediscover its combat system and visual presentation, simulated with remarkable precision on contemporary systems.

I allocated the majority of my time playing the arcade classics, particularly Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Numerous titles here remain enjoyable, notably with one-on-one local play. However, facing the aforementioned game's AI-controlled opponents is a testament to how primitive and unfair the development approached in the series' initial installments. AI-managed characters clearly employ dishonest tactics or are otherwise dumb as rocks. Lacking another person to compete with — online play is available in most titles in the collection, but rather basic in functionality — you'll miss the full enjoyment.

Display Features

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the collection, a combination of coin-op, home system, and portable titles, are precisely simulated, though I detected a few small quirks — mainly control latency and intermittent errors, particularly in Mortal Kombat 4. Although the titles are mostly shown in their original form, the development team has added several intelligent quality-of-life features and graphical adjustment settings. As an illustration, players have the option to display fighter-specific techniques during gameplay and select to activate unlimited duration to complete lethal techniques. There are also options for accessing hidden fighters, eliminating the need to execute some esoteric trick to unlock them.

Artistically, the releases can be experienced with numerous visual enhancements and presentation styles. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection offers very realistic options that simulate the cathode-ray tube displays of coin-op establishments or household displays, or the greenscale screen of a Game Boy. An especially welcome feature is the option to have gaming hall-style borders surrounding the screen, with your selected Mortal Kombat title accurately and softly reflecting against the artificial ebony plastic frames. It's quite aesthetically pleasing.

Extra Content

The collection includes numerous nice touches beyond the historical footage and recreated vintage titles, containing a soundtrack mode that lets you revisit the tunes of various Mortal Kombat games without the din of combatants violently defeating each other. There are also fighter biographies that feature histories and numerous narrative components displayed via arcade games' attract mode screens and endings.

Historical Preservation

Among the most significant features for hardcore Mortal Kombat fans is the ability to access a example of historically missing material in the guise of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This particular edition, a somewhat revised iteration of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an initial venture by the company at direct online competitive gaming in gaming halls. This network version of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but included the option to challenge online opponents and featured various slight bug fixes and balance. Yet this online edition didn't find widespread adoption, in part