🔗 Share this article

Mortal Kombat retains numerous undisclosed elements and the power to astonish, well past its 30th anniversary after its original launch in arcades. This latest compilation covering the franchise's earliest days, featuring four original arcade titles, multiple console adaptations, and related titles, transcends just a well-emulated set of legendary games along with lesser-known entries — it functions as a rich documentary about the development of the legendary series.

Even as a lifelong enthusiast of the series who has paid close attention its origins and transformation, there was plenty new for me to understand and value about the series.

What Constitutes the Historical Compilation

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like other retro collections from developer Digital Eclipse, portion educational film, part playable archive. The collection includes simulated releases of the original arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, including television and mobile versions of some of those games. This compilation also features the series' ventures at derivative games, like action-oriented titles Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — among the series' least successful installments.

The Legacy Kollection consequently doesn't represent a highlight reel anthology, but an exploration into Mortal Kombat's early days, when developer Midway and series co-creators the visionary developers were figuring out how to create a combat title, created from video recordings of actual people, on the fly. Viewing the historical footage — which includes historical videos, contemporary discussions, and digital copies of vintage posters, illustrated stories, and even company memos — it's remarkable to see how the franchise evolved from modest origins to a international craze. It's frankly astounding to see a group of pioneering developers, operating with virtually no plan or oversight, focus their cultural enthusiasms into creating a legendary video game series.

Educational Component

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection documents the ascent of the fighting series and the founders' vocational paths at the now-defunct Midway. It then goes on to show how these identical developers reckoned with how to regularly outdo their previous work, experiencing considerable pressure to repeat their triumphs. It represents an intriguing historical record constructed using video recordings and film-based pictures and manual drawings, which showcase the DIY nature of the series' creation process and how word of mouth helped spread its rumors and secrets of MK in its golden era in coin-op establishments. Told in bite-sized chunks, it's an eminently watchable collection of mini-documentaries that covers video games, graphic novels, movies and even the silly live-action tour. The compilation also contains some unreleased actions and game character images among its archived development assets.

Interactive Gaming

Placed within the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are invitations to experience the actual titles. At certain intervals, users can directly access a Mortal Kombat title or a home system version to rediscover its combat system and graphics, recreated with impressive accuracy on contemporary systems.

I allocated the majority of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, particularly Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Numerous titles here hold up, particularly during direct competitive sessions. Yet competing with the aforementioned game's AI-controlled opponents is a testament to how primitive and unjust the development approached in the series' initial installments. AI-managed characters obviously use unfair advantages or are conversely remarkably unintelligent. If you don't have another person to compete with — online play is available in the majority of included games, but too light on features — the experience will be incomplete.

Display Features

The 23 playable Mortal Kombat games in the anthology, a mix of arcade, console, and handheld games, are precisely simulated, though I detected a few small quirks — primarily delayed responses and sporadic glitches, especially with Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are primarily displayed authentically, developer Digital Eclipse has added several intelligent user experience improvements and graphical adjustment settings. For instance, users can elect to reveal combatant-unique actions on-screen and choose to enable unlimited duration to complete lethal techniques. Additionally available are settings for accessing hidden fighters, eliminating the need to execute complicated methods to access them.

Artistically, the releases can be played with a variety of graphical effects and display options. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection offers very realistic filters that mimic the traditional television screens of coin-op establishments or household displays, or the limited color monitor of a Game Boy. An especially welcome feature is the option to have coin-op-inspired frames encircling the display, with the MK game of your choice faithfully and subtly duplicating against the simulated dark plastic edges. It's very artistically charming.

Additional Features

The collection includes numerous nice touches beyond the documentary and emulated arcade classics, including a music player that lets you revisit the tunes of various combat titles without the din of combatants violently defeating each other. There are also fighter biographies that feature histories and the various bits of lore presented by arcade games' attract mode screens and final sequences.

Lost Media Recovery

A particularly notable inclusion for dedicated series enthusiasts is the chance to experience a example of historically missing material in the form of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This specific release, a somewhat revised iteration of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an pioneering effort from the developer at direct online competitive gaming in coin-op establishments. The Wavenet Edition of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but featured the capability to battle network competitors and contained several small glitch repairs and refinements. But the Wavenet update never gained traction, in part