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This iconic fighting game continues to hold many hidden mysteries and the ability to amaze, over three decades after its original launch in coin-op establishments. The recent anthology spanning the franchise's earliest days, which includes a quartet of arcade releases, multiple console adaptations, and spinoffs, goes beyond simply a faithfully reproduced collection of iconic titles along with lesser-known entries — it functions as a comprehensive historical account about the development of the legendary series.

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

What Makes the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like other retro collections from developer Digital Eclipse, portion educational film, part playable archive. This compilation features emulated versions of the pioneering 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 franchise's attempts at spinoffs, like action-oriented titles Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — two of the franchise's worst entries.

The Legacy Kollection thus isn't a greatest hits compilation, but an examination of the franchise's initial era, when the creators at Midway and series co-creators the creative duo behind the series were discovering methods to develop a battle series, created from video recordings of real actors, as they went along. Watching the documentary — that features historical videos, recent conversations, and scans of old flyers, illustrated stories, and even company memos — it's incredible to witness how the franchise evolved from modest origins to a international craze. It's truly remarkable to observe several early video game creators, developing without clear direction or guidance, focus their cultural enthusiasms into birthing an iconic game franchise.

Documentary Portion

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection charts the rise of the fighting series and its creators' careers at the now-defunct Midway. It then goes on to show how the very same individuals contended with how to consistently surpass their achievements, facing no small amount of demand to replicate their triumphs. It represents an intriguing historical record constructed using VHS tapes and film-based pictures and hand-drawn illustrations, which reveal the self-made character of the franchise's production method and how word of mouth helped spread its rumors and secrets of MK in its arcade heyday. Told in bite-sized chunks, it's highly engaging collection of mini-documentaries that spans games, comics, films and even the comical physical events. It also includes some unreleased actions and digital fighter representations among its previously unreleased material.

Playable Component

Placed within the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are prompts to play the actual titles. During specific moments, users can directly access a game of Mortal Kombat or a console adaptation to reexperience its mechanics and artistic style, emulated nearly perfectly on modern hardware.

I dedicated most of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, particularly Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Many of the games here hold up, particularly during local multiplayer matches. Yet competing with the computer-controlled adversaries in these titles is a demonstration of how basic and unbalanced the development approached in the series' initial installments. CPU-controlled opponents blatantly cheat to win or are otherwise dumb as rocks. If you don't have someone to play against — internet multiplayer exists in numerous anthology releases, but too light on features — you'll be missing out.

Technical Presentation

The 23 playable Mortal Kombat games in the collection, a combination of arcade, console, and handheld games, are accurately emulated, though I detected a handful slight anomalies — primarily delayed responses and intermittent errors, particularly in Mortal Kombat 4. And while the games are mostly shown in their original form, the creators has added several intelligent quality-of-life features and visual presentation options. As an illustration, users can elect to display fighter-specific techniques on the display and choose to enable infinite time to execute finishing moves. Also included are choices for unlocking secret characters, removing the requirement to complete some esoteric trick to obtain them.

Artistically, the releases can be enjoyed with multiple visual enhancements and presentation styles. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection includes remarkably accurate filters that mimic the CRT monitors of gaming halls or home televisions, or the monochrome green display of a portable gaming device. An especially welcome feature is the choice to enable arcade-like bezels framing the gameplay, with the specific combat game you're playing precisely and gently mirroring against the artificial ebony plastic frames. It's remarkably visually appealing.

Bonus Elements

There are plenty of nice touches beyond the historical footage and recreated vintage titles, featuring an audio component that enables players to reexperience the soundtracks of different fighting releases absent the noise of combatants violently defeating each other. Additionally included are fighter biographies that include bios and numerous narrative components shown through the demo sequences of coin-op titles and final sequences.

Lost Media Recovery

Among the most significant features for hardcore Mortal Kombat fans is the ability to access a piece of "lost media" in the format of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This version of the game, a moderately improved edition of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an early attempt by Midway at head-to-head network battles in arcades. The online-enabled release of the game is virtually identical to UMK3, but included the option to challenge online opponents and included some minor error corrections and adjustments. However, this network version failed to achieve popularity, in part