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Mortal Kombat continues to hold its share of secrets and the capacity to surprise, more than 30 years after its first appearance in arcades. This latest compilation including the series' initial period, comprising four arcade games, various home ports, and related titles, transcends just a well-emulated series of classics along with lesser-known entries — it additionally serves as a detailed chronicle about the creation of the legendary series.

As a dedicated devotee of the franchise who has closely monitored its origins and transformation, there was numerous fresh aspects for me to understand and value about the series.

What Makes the Legacy Collection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection similar to previous classic compilations from the creators at Digital Eclipse, part documentary, part playable archive. The collection includes digitally recreated editions of the original 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 collection even includes the franchise's attempts 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 “best of” collection, but an exploration into the series' formative period, when developer Midway and brand founders Ed Boon and John Tobias were determining how to make a fighting game, digitized from footage of live performers, through experimentation. Watching the documentary — containing archival footage, recent conversations, and reproductions of classic advertisements, graphic novels, and including internal communications — it's astonishing to observe how the franchise evolved from simple starts to a international craze. It's truly remarkable to see a group of pioneering developers, operating with virtually no plan or supervision, direct their entertainment passions into birthing an iconic game franchise.

Documentary Portion

The historical documentation of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection traces the growth of Mortal Kombat and the developers' professional journeys at the no-longer-operating Midway. It further illustrates how those same creators contended with how to consistently surpass their achievements, facing no small amount of stress to duplicate their success. It represents an intriguing historical record constructed using VHS tapes and film-based pictures and hand-drawn illustrations, which demonstrate the hands-on approach of the series' creation process and how personal recommendations helped disseminate its secrets and undisclosed elements of the series in its golden era in coin-op establishments. Told in bite-sized chunks, it's highly engaging set of brief historical films that spans games, comics, films and even the silly live-action tour. It also includes some unused moves and character sprites among its cutting-room-floor content.

Interactive Gaming

Placed within the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are prompts to play the original releases. During specific moments, audience members can jump into a game of Mortal Kombat or a console adaptation to rediscover its combat system and visual presentation, recreated with impressive accuracy on current technology.

I spent the bulk of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, particularly Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Several releases here stand the test of time, notably with direct competitive sessions. But playing against the computer-controlled adversaries in these titles is a demonstration of how basic and unjust the development approached in the series' initial installments. Computer-directed fighters blatantly cheat to win or are otherwise dumb as rocks. If you don't have a human opponent — internet multiplayer exists in numerous anthology releases, but somewhat limited in options — you'll be missing out.

Display Features

The 23 playable Mortal Kombat games in the compilation, a combination of gaming hall, television, and mobile releases, are faithfully recreated, though I detected a couple minor issues — primarily delayed responses and intermittent errors, particularly in Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are largely presented as-is, developer Digital Eclipse has incorporated various clever user experience improvements and graphical adjustment settings. For instance, you can choose to display fighter-specific techniques during gameplay and opt to have unlimited duration to perform a Fatality. Additionally available are settings for unlocking secret characters, without having to perform some esoteric trick to access them.

Artistically, the releases can be enjoyed with multiple graphical effects and display options. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection provides highly authentic options that simulate the CRT monitors of coin-op establishments or domestic TVs, or the greenscale screen of a Nintendo handheld. A particularly nice touch is the option to have gaming hall-style borders encircling the display, with the specific combat game you're playing precisely and gently mirroring against the simulated dark plastic edges. It's quite aesthetically pleasing.

Additional Features

There are plenty of welcome features besides the educational material and simulated classic games, containing a soundtrack mode that enables players to reexperience the soundtracks of different fighting releases absent the noise of two kombatants viciously slaughtering each other. Additionally included are character profiles that include bios and numerous narrative components displayed via the idle displays of gaming hall releases and conclusions.

Archival Discovery

One of the biggest highlights for dedicated series enthusiasts is the opportunity to play 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 initial venture by the company at direct online competitive gaming in coin-op establishments. The online-enabled release of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but provided the ability to challenge online opponents and featured various slight bug fixes and balance. However, this network version didn't find widespread adoption, in part