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This iconic fighting game retains its share of secrets and the power to astonish, more than 30 years after its original launch in coin-op establishments. A new collection including the franchise's earliest days, comprising four original arcade titles, several home system versions, and derivative games, goes beyond just a well-emulated set of legendary games along with lesser-known entries — it functions as a rich documentary about the creation of the legendary series.

Even as a lifelong devotee of the franchise who has paid close attention its creation and evolution, there was numerous fresh aspects for me to discover and admire about the series.

What Makes the Legacy Collection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection similar to other vintage game anthologies from the creators at Digital Eclipse, part documentary, section playable historical record. This compilation features simulated releases of the original arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, including television and mobile versions of several of these titles. This compilation also features the series' ventures at spinoffs, like action-oriented titles Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — two of the franchise's most criticized releases.

The Legacy Kollection consequently doesn't represent a highlight reel anthology, but a study of the franchise's initial era, when the development team Midway and franchise originators Ed Boon and John Tobias were figuring out how to create a combat title, created from video recordings of actual people, through experimentation. Watching the documentary — that features archival footage, contemporary discussions, and reproductions of classic advertisements, comics, and including internal communications — it's incredible to witness how the series transformed from modest origins to a international craze. It's genuinely amazing to watch a handful of pioneering developers, developing without clear direction or supervision, focus their cultural enthusiasms into creating a legendary video game series.

Historical Section

The historical documentation of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection charts the rise of the combat franchise and the developers' professional journeys at the currently closed Midway. It further illustrates how these identical developers reckoned with how to regularly outdo their previous work, encountering significant demand to replicate their success. It represents an intriguing historical record made from analog films and analog photographs and hand-drawn illustrations, which showcase the DIY nature of the series' creation process and how personal recommendations helped spread its rumors and secrets of MK in its arcade heyday. Presented in manageable segments, it's an eminently watchable collection of mini-documentaries that includes titles, illustrated stories, cinematic adaptations and even the comical physical events. The collection additionally features some unreleased actions and digital fighter representations among its archived development assets.

Interactive Gaming

Placed within the five-part documentary's timeline are prompts to play the original releases. At certain intervals, audience members can jump into a Mortal Kombat title or one of its home console ports to rediscover its combat system and graphics, recreated with impressive accuracy on current technology.

I dedicated most of my time experiencing the original arcade titles, particularly Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Several releases here remain enjoyable, notably with local multiplayer matches. Yet competing with the computer-controlled adversaries in these titles is a demonstration of how basic and unfair the programming was in the franchise's pioneering releases. AI-managed characters clearly employ dishonest tactics or are alternatively incredibly stupid. If you don't have someone to play against — network gaming is included in numerous anthology releases, but rather basic in functionality — the experience will be incomplete.

Visual Options

The 23 playable Mortal Kombat games in the anthology, a blend of coin-op, home system, and portable titles, are faithfully recreated, though I have noticed a few small quirks — mainly control latency and intermittent errors, notably within Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are mostly shown in their original form, developer Digital Eclipse has added several intelligent user experience improvements and visual presentation options. For example, users can elect to display fighter-specific techniques on the display and choose to enable endless periods to complete lethal techniques. Additionally available are settings for accessing hidden fighters, without having to perform complicated methods to unlock them.

Artistically, the releases can be experienced with numerous filters and visual treatments. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection offers very realistic effects that reproduce the traditional television screens of gaming halls or household displays, or the greenscale screen of a portable gaming device. An especially welcome feature is the setting to activate coin-op-inspired frames encircling the display, with the MK game of your choice faithfully and subtly duplicating against the artificial ebony plastic frames. It's very artistically charming.

Bonus Elements

Players will discover multiple welcome features besides the historical footage and recreated vintage titles, including a music player that enables players to reexperience the soundtracks of different combat titles excluding the sounds of fighters brutally eliminating opponents. There are also character profiles that feature histories and the various bits of lore presented by the demo sequences of coin-op titles and endings.

Historical Preservation

A particularly notable inclusion for committed franchise followers is the ability to access a piece of "lost media" in the guise of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This specific release, a slightly updated version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an early attempt by Midway at direct online competitive gaming in gaming halls. This network version of the game is virtually identical to UMK3, but provided the ability to challenge online opponents and included some minor bug fixes and balance. However, this network version didn't find widespread adoption, in part