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The Mortal Kombat series continues to hold numerous undisclosed elements and the ability to amaze, more than 30 years after its original launch in arcades. The recent anthology including the franchise's earliest days, comprising a quartet of arcade releases, several home system versions, and spinoffs, is more than just a well-emulated series of classics including less celebrated releases — it functions as a comprehensive historical account about the making of the legendary series.

Being a long-time enthusiast of the series who has carefully followed its creation and evolution, there was plenty new for me to understand and value about the series.

What Makes the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like previous classic compilations from the development team Digital Eclipse, part historical documentation, part playable archive. The collection includes digitally recreated editions 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. The collection even includes the brand's experiments at spin-off titles, like action-oriented titles Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — among the series' least successful installments.

The Legacy Kollection is therefore not a “best of” collection, but an exploration into Mortal Kombat's early days, when the creators at Midway and franchise originators Ed Boon and John Tobias were determining how to develop a battle series, created from video recordings of actual people, on the fly. Watching the documentary — that features archival footage, contemporary discussions, and reproductions of classic advertisements, illustrated stories, and including internal communications — it's astonishing to observe how the franchise evolved from simple starts to a international craze. It's truly remarkable to watch a handful of young game developers, working with minimal planning or supervision, direct their entertainment passions into creating a legendary video game series.

Educational Component

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection traces the growth of the fighting series and its creators' careers at the currently closed Midway. It further illustrates how those same creators addressed how to routinely one-up themselves, encountering significant demand to replicate their achievements. It represents an intriguing historical record made from analog films and analog photographs and manual drawings, which demonstrate the hands-on approach of Mortal Kombat's development 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 spans games, comics, films and even the silly live-action tour. It also includes some unreleased actions and game character images among its previously unreleased material.

Interactive Experience

Placed within the quintet of documentary episodes' progression 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 artistic style, recreated with impressive accuracy on modern hardware.

I spent the bulk of my time experiencing the original arcade titles, particularly Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Numerous titles here hold up, especially in direct competitive sessions. However, facing the artificial intelligence fighters in these releases is a testament to how primitive and unbalanced the programming was in the series' initial installments. Computer-directed fighters clearly employ dishonest tactics or are conversely remarkably unintelligent. Without having a human opponent — online play is available in the majority of included games, but rather basic in functionality — you'll be missing out.

Technical Presentation

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the collection, a mix of coin-op, home system, and portable titles, are precisely simulated, though I detected a handful slight anomalies — primarily delayed responses and the occasional bug, notably within Mortal Kombat 4. Although the titles are mostly shown in their original form, developer Digital Eclipse has added several intelligent quality-of-life features and display customization choices. For instance, players have the option to reveal combatant-unique actions on-screen and choose to enable endless periods to execute finishing moves. Additionally available are settings for unlocking secret characters, without having to perform complicated methods to obtain them.

Visually, the games can be enjoyed with multiple visual enhancements and presentation styles. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection offers very realistic filters that mimic the cathode-ray tube displays of coin-op establishments or home televisions, or the monochrome green display of a portable gaming device. A particularly nice touch is the setting to activate coin-op-inspired frames framing the gameplay, with your selected Mortal Kombat title precisely and gently mirroring against the artificial ebony plastic frames. It's remarkably visually appealing.

Extra Content

Players will discover multiple welcome features besides the educational material and simulated classic games, containing a soundtrack mode that allows users to rediscover the tunes of various combat titles without the din of combatants violently defeating each other. There are also character profiles that contain backgrounds and the various bits of lore shown through the idle displays of gaming hall releases and endings.

Archival Discovery

A particularly notable inclusion for dedicated series enthusiasts is the chance to experience a piece of "lost media" in the format of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This particular edition, a slightly updated version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an early attempt by Midway at one-on-one internet-based play in gaming halls. This network version of the game is virtually identical to UMK3, but included the option to compete against internet adversaries and included some minor glitch repairs and refinements. However, this network version never gained traction, in part