🔗 Share this article

Mortal Kombat still possesses its share of secrets and the capacity to surprise, more than 30 years after its initial debut in gaming halls. A new collection including the series' initial period, which includes four arcade games, several home system versions, and spinoffs, is more than simply a faithfully reproduced collection of iconic titles including less celebrated releases — it's also a detailed chronicle about the making of the iconic franchise.

Even as a lifelong enthusiast of the series who has carefully followed its development and progression, there was plenty new for me to discover and admire about the series.

What Defines the Legacy Collection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection similar to previous classic compilations from developer Digital Eclipse, part documentary, part playable archive. This compilation features digitally recreated editions of the original arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, plus console and handheld ports of certain releases. This compilation also features the brand's experiments at spinoffs, like combat-focused releases Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — among the series' most criticized releases.

The Legacy Kollection is therefore not a “best of” collection, but an examination of the series' formative period, when developer Midway and series co-creators the visionary developers were determining how to create a combat title, produced using film material of real actors, on the fly. Observing the archival material — containing archival footage, contemporary discussions, and reproductions of classic advertisements, illustrated stories, and even interoffice faxes — it's remarkable to see how Mortal Kombat went from simple starts to a worldwide phenomenon. It's genuinely amazing to watch a handful of pioneering developers, working with minimal planning or oversight, channel their pop-culture interests into creating a legendary video game series.

Historical Section

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection charts the rise of the combat franchise and the founders' vocational paths at the no-longer-operating Midway. It further illustrates how these identical developers contended with how to regularly outdo their previous work, facing no small amount of demand to replicate their triumphs. It's a fascinating time capsule made from video recordings and film-based pictures and hand-drawn illustrations, which reveal the self-made character of the series' creation process and how oral tradition helped disseminate its secrets and secrets of MK in its peak period in gaming halls. Presented in manageable segments, it's highly engaging set of brief historical films that includes titles, illustrated stories, cinematic adaptations and including the humorous real-world tour. The collection additionally features some never-implemented techniques and character sprites among its cutting-room-floor content.

Interactive Gaming

Distributed throughout the five-part documentary's timeline are invitations to experience the games themselves. At various points, users can directly access a combat game session or a home system version to revisit its gameplay and graphics, emulated nearly perfectly on current technology.

I dedicated most of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, especially Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Numerous titles here hold up, particularly during direct competitive sessions. However, facing the aforementioned game's AI-controlled opponents is a reminder of how crude and unjust the development approached in the series' initial installments. AI-managed characters obviously use unfair advantages or are otherwise dumb as rocks. If you don't have a human opponent — network gaming is included in the majority of included games, but somewhat limited in options — you'll miss the full enjoyment.

Visual Options

The 23 playable Mortal Kombat games in the compilation, a combination of arcade, console, and handheld games, are faithfully recreated, though I detected a couple minor issues — mainly control latency and intermittent errors, notably within Mortal Kombat 4. Although the titles are mostly shown in their original form, the development team has included some smart convenience enhancements and display customization choices. For instance, users can elect to display fighter-specific techniques during gameplay and select to activate infinite time to perform a Fatality. There are also options for revealing concealed combatants, eliminating the need to execute complicated methods to access them.

Graphically, the titles can be played with a variety of graphical effects and display options. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection includes remarkably accurate effects that reproduce the cathode-ray tube displays of coin-op establishments or home televisions, or the greenscale screen of a Nintendo handheld. An especially welcome feature is the option to have gaming hall-style borders encircling the display, with the MK game of your choice faithfully and subtly duplicating against the faux black plastic borders. It's quite aesthetically pleasing.

Extra Content

The collection includes numerous nice touches beyond the educational material and simulated classic games, containing a soundtrack mode that allows users to rediscover the tunes of various combat titles excluding the sounds of combatants violently defeating each other. There are also combatant descriptions that feature histories and the various bits of lore displayed via the idle displays of gaming hall releases and endings.

Lost Media Recovery

One of the biggest highlights for committed franchise followers is the opportunity to play a example of historically missing material in the format of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This version of the game, a slightly updated version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an pioneering effort from the developer at one-on-one internet-based play in coin-op establishments. The online-enabled release of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but featured the capability to battle network competitors and featured various slight error corrections and adjustments. Yet this online edition never gained traction, in part