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The Mortal Kombat series continues to hold many hidden mysteries and the ability to amaze, well past its 30th anniversary after its original launch in arcades. A new collection including the franchise's earliest days, comprising four arcade games, various home ports, and derivative games, is more than simply a faithfully reproduced collection of iconic titles including less celebrated releases — it's also a comprehensive historical account about the making of the iconic franchise.

Being a long-time Mortal Kombat fan who has carefully followed its origins and transformation, there was numerous fresh aspects for me to discover and admire about the series.

What Makes the Historical Compilation

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like other vintage game anthologies from developer Digital Eclipse, portion educational film, portion interactive museum. 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. This compilation also features the series' ventures at spinoffs, like action-oriented titles Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — some of the brand's worst entries.

The Legacy Kollection consequently doesn't represent a “best of” collection, but a study of the series' formative period, when the creators at Midway and series co-creators Ed Boon and John Tobias were determining how to make a fighting game, created from video recordings of real actors, on the fly. Observing the archival material — containing archival footage, contemporary discussions, and scans of old flyers, graphic novels, and including internal communications — it's remarkable to see how Mortal Kombat went from modest origins to a international craze. It's truly remarkable to watch a handful of pioneering developers, developing without clear direction or guidance, channel their pop-culture interests into birthing an iconic game franchise.

Educational Component

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection documents the ascent of the combat franchise and the developers' professional journeys at the no-longer-operating Midway. It then goes on to show how the very same individuals reckoned with how to consistently surpass their achievements, encountering significant stress to duplicate their triumphs. It's a fascinating time capsule constructed using analog films and film-based pictures and hand-drawn illustrations, which reveal the self-made character of Mortal Kombat's development and how word of mouth helped circulate its mysteries and secrets of MK in its peak period in gaming halls. Delivered in easily digestible portions, it's highly engaging series of documentary shorts that spans games, comics, films and including the humorous real-world tour. The collection additionally features some unused moves and character sprites among its previously unreleased material.

Playable Component

Placed within the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are opportunities to engage with the original releases. At various points, users can directly access a Mortal Kombat title or a home system version to revisit its gameplay and visual presentation, recreated with impressive accuracy on contemporary systems.

I allocated the majority of my time playing the arcade classics, particularly Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Many of the games here stand the test of time, notably with direct competitive sessions. But playing against the aforementioned game's AI-controlled opponents is a demonstration of how basic and unfair the development approached in the series' initial installments. AI-managed characters blatantly cheat to win or are otherwise dumb as rocks. If you don't have someone to play against — internet multiplayer exists in most titles in the collection, but too light on features — the experience will be incomplete.

Visual Options

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the collection, a mix of gaming hall, television, and mobile releases, are faithfully recreated, though I detected a couple minor issues — mostly input lag and intermittent errors, notably within Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are mostly shown in their original form, developer Digital Eclipse has incorporated various clever convenience enhancements and display customization choices. For instance, you can choose to reveal combatant-unique actions on-screen and select to activate unlimited duration to perform a Fatality. There are also options for revealing concealed combatants, eliminating the need to execute obscure techniques to access them.

Graphically, the titles can be enjoyed with multiple graphical effects and display options. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection offers very realistic effects that reproduce the cathode-ray tube displays of gaming halls or domestic TVs, or the monochrome green display of a portable gaming device. An especially welcome feature is the option to have coin-op-inspired frames encircling the display, with the specific combat game you're playing faithfully and subtly duplicating against the simulated dark plastic edges. It's remarkably visually appealing.

Additional Features

Players will discover multiple welcome features besides the documentary and emulated arcade classics, featuring an audio component that enables players to reexperience the music from multiple Mortal Kombat games excluding the sounds of two kombatants viciously slaughtering each other. Additionally included are fighter biographies that include bios and the various bits of lore presented by the idle displays of gaming hall releases and endings.

Lost Media Recovery

A particularly notable inclusion for hardcore Mortal Kombat fans is the chance to experience a piece of "lost media" in the guise of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This specific release, a moderately improved edition of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an pioneering effort from the developer at head-to-head network battles in gaming halls. This network version of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but included the option to compete against internet adversaries and included some minor error corrections and adjustments. Yet this online edition didn't find widespread adoption, in part