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This iconic fighting game retains its share of secrets and the ability to amaze, more than 30 years after its first appearance in gaming halls. The recent anthology including the brand's formative years, comprising four arcade games, several home system versions, and spinoffs, goes beyond only a accurately simulated series of classics along with lesser-known entries — it functions as a detailed chronicle about the development of the iconic franchise.

Being a long-time enthusiast of the series who has carefully followed its development and progression, there was numerous fresh aspects for me to learn and appreciate about the series.

What Makes the Historical Compilation

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection similar to previous classic compilations from the creators at Digital Eclipse, part documentary, part playable archive. The collection includes emulated versions of the first 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 brand's experiments at spin-off titles, like combat-focused releases Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — among the series' worst entries.

The Legacy Kollection consequently doesn't represent a highlight reel anthology, but a study of the series' formative period, when the creators at Midway and franchise originators the visionary developers were discovering methods to create a combat title, digitized from footage of actual people, on the fly. Watching the documentary — containing vintage recordings, new interviews, and digital copies of vintage posters, illustrated stories, and including internal communications — it's remarkable to see how the franchise evolved from humble beginnings to a global sensation. It's frankly astounding to watch a handful of young game developers, operating with virtually no plan or supervision, channel their pop-culture interests into creating a legendary video game series.

Educational Component

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection charts the rise of Mortal Kombat and the developers' professional journeys at the no-longer-operating Midway. It further illustrates how these identical developers addressed how to regularly outdo their previous work, encountering significant demand to replicate their achievements. It's a fascinating time capsule composed of analog films and film-based pictures and pencil sketches, which reveal the self-made character of the franchise's production method and how word of mouth helped circulate its mysteries and hidden aspects of Mortal Kombat in its arcade heyday. Presented in manageable segments, it's highly engaging 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

Distributed throughout the five-segment historical film's chronology are prompts to play the original releases. At certain intervals, viewers can hop into a combat game session or a home system version to reexperience its mechanics and artistic style, emulated nearly perfectly on modern hardware.

I allocated the majority of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, specifically Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Several releases here hold up, notably with direct competitive sessions. However, facing the artificial intelligence fighters in these releases is a reminder of how crude and unfair the development approached in the franchise's pioneering releases. Computer-directed fighters obviously use unfair advantages or are conversely remarkably unintelligent. If you don't have someone to play against — network gaming is included in most titles in the collection, but rather basic in functionality — you'll be missing out.

Display Features

The two dozen available combat games in the anthology, a combination of arcade, console, and handheld games, are faithfully recreated, though I've observed a handful slight anomalies — mainly control latency and intermittent errors, especially with Mortal Kombat 4. And while the games are mostly shown in their original form, the creators has included some smart quality-of-life features and display customization choices. For instance, players have the option to reveal combatant-unique actions during gameplay and opt to have unlimited duration to perform a Fatality. Additionally available are settings for revealing concealed combatants, without having to perform complicated methods to obtain them.

Visually, the games can be experienced with numerous visual enhancements and presentation styles. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection provides highly authentic filters that mimic the traditional television screens of arcades or home televisions, or the greenscale screen of a Nintendo handheld. A particularly nice touch is the choice to enable coin-op-inspired frames surrounding the screen, with the specific combat game you're playing precisely and gently mirroring against the simulated dark plastic edges. It's quite aesthetically pleasing.

Bonus Elements

There are plenty of appreciated elements beyond the historical footage and recreated vintage titles, featuring an audio component that allows users to rediscover the music from multiple combat titles excluding the sounds of combatants violently defeating each other. Additionally included are combatant descriptions that include bios and the various bits of lore displayed via arcade games' attract mode screens and endings.

Historical Preservation

A particularly notable inclusion for committed franchise followers is the chance to experience a piece of "lost media" in the guise of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This specific release, a slightly updated version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an early attempt by Midway at head-to-head network battles in coin-op establishments. This network version 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 never gained traction, in part