🔗 Share this article

The Mortal Kombat series still possesses its share of secrets and the power to astonish, well past its 30th anniversary after its first appearance in gaming halls. This latest compilation covering the franchise's earliest days, which includes a quartet of arcade releases, various home ports, and spinoffs, goes beyond simply a faithfully reproduced series of classics including less celebrated releases — it additionally serves as a detailed chronicle about the creation of the iconic franchise.

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

What Makes the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like other vintage game anthologies from developer Digital Eclipse, part historical documentation, portion interactive museum. This compilation features simulated releases of the first arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, including television and mobile versions of certain releases. The anthology additionally contains the series' ventures at spinoffs, like action games Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — two of the franchise's least successful installments.

The Legacy Kollection thus isn't a greatest hits compilation, but an exploration into the series' formative period, when developer Midway and franchise originators the creative duo behind the series were determining how to make a fighting game, digitized from footage of actual people, through experimentation. 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 the series transformed from humble beginnings to a global sensation. It's truly remarkable to observe several pioneering developers, developing without clear direction or guidance, channel their pop-culture interests into establishing an enduring gaming brand.

Educational Component

The educational segment of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection charts the rise of the fighting series and the founders' vocational paths at the no-longer-operating Midway. It then goes on to show how these identical developers addressed how to consistently surpass their achievements, facing no small amount of pressure to repeat their achievements. It represents an intriguing historical record constructed using VHS tapes and film-based pictures and hand-drawn illustrations, which showcase the DIY nature of the series' creation process and how oral tradition helped disseminate its secrets and hidden aspects of Mortal Kombat 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 even the comical physical events. It also includes some unused moves and game character images among its previously unreleased material.

Interactive Gaming

Interspersed along the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are opportunities to engage with the games themselves. At various points, viewers can hop into a combat game session or a console adaptation to reexperience its mechanics and visual presentation, emulated nearly perfectly on current technology.

I allocated the majority of my time playing the arcade classics, especially Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Many of the games here hold up, particularly during direct competitive sessions. But playing against the artificial intelligence fighters in these releases is a testament to how primitive and unbalanced the development approached in the series' initial installments. AI-managed characters blatantly cheat to win or are otherwise dumb as rocks. Lacking a human opponent — internet multiplayer exists in numerous anthology releases, but somewhat limited in options — you'll miss the full enjoyment.

Technical Presentation

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the collection, a blend of coin-op, home system, and portable titles, are faithfully recreated, though I have noticed a handful slight anomalies — mainly control latency and sporadic glitches, particularly in Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are largely presented as-is, developer Digital Eclipse has incorporated various clever quality-of-life features and graphical adjustment settings. For example, users can elect to reveal combatant-unique actions on-screen and select to activate endless periods to perform a Fatality. Additionally available are settings for revealing concealed combatants, eliminating the need to execute some esoteric trick to obtain them.

Artistically, the releases can be experienced with numerous visual enhancements and presentation styles. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection includes remarkably accurate options that simulate the cathode-ray tube displays of coin-op establishments or domestic TVs, or the limited color monitor of a portable gaming device. A particularly nice touch is the option to have gaming hall-style borders framing the gameplay, with the specific combat game you're playing faithfully and subtly duplicating against the faux black plastic borders. It's quite aesthetically pleasing.

Additional Features

Players will discover multiple appreciated elements beyond the documentary and emulated arcade classics, including a music player that enables players to reexperience the soundtracks of different Mortal Kombat games absent the noise of fighters brutally eliminating opponents. Also present are character profiles that include bios and numerous narrative components presented by the idle displays of gaming hall releases and endings.

Historical Preservation

Among the most significant features for dedicated series enthusiasts is the opportunity to play a segment of previously unavailable content in the form of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This particular edition, a slightly updated version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an initial venture by the company at head-to-head network battles in gaming halls. The Wavenet Edition of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but featured the capability to battle network competitors and included some minor error corrections and adjustments. But the Wavenet update never gained traction, in part