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Mortal Kombat retains numerous undisclosed elements and the power to astonish, well past its 30th anniversary after its initial debut in arcades. A new collection spanning the brand's formative years, featuring four arcade games, several home system versions, and derivative games, transcends just a well-emulated collection of iconic titles including less celebrated releases — it functions as a detailed chronicle about the making of the renowned brand.

Even as a lifelong Mortal Kombat fan who has closely monitored its development and progression, there was plenty new for me to discover and admire about the series.

What Makes the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like previous classic compilations from the creators at Digital Eclipse, part documentary, section playable historical record. The collection includes emulated versions 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 anthology additionally contains the franchise's attempts at spin-off titles, like action-oriented titles Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — some of the brand's worst entries.

The Legacy Kollection thus isn't a “best of” collection, but an examination of the series' formative period, when the creators at Midway and franchise originators Ed Boon and John Tobias were discovering methods to make a fighting game, digitized from footage of real actors, on the fly. Watching the documentary — that features historical videos, new interviews, and reproductions of classic advertisements, illustrated stories, and even interoffice faxes — it's astonishing to observe how the franchise evolved from simple starts to a global sensation. It's genuinely amazing to watch a handful of young game developers, operating with virtually no plan or oversight, channel their pop-culture interests into birthing an iconic game franchise.

Educational Component

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection charts the rise of the fighting series and its creators' careers at the currently closed Midway. It further illustrates how the very same individuals contended with how to regularly outdo their previous work, experiencing considerable demand to replicate their achievements. It represents an intriguing historical record constructed using analog films and film-based pictures and hand-drawn illustrations, which reveal the self-made character of the series' creation process and how personal recommendations helped circulate its mysteries and undisclosed elements of the series in its golden era in coin-op establishments. Delivered in easily digestible portions, it's highly engaging set of brief historical films that includes titles, illustrated stories, cinematic adaptations and including the humorous real-world tour. The compilation also contains some unused moves and game character images among its cutting-room-floor content.

Interactive Experience

Placed within the five-part documentary's timeline are prompts to play the games themselves. At various points, users can directly access a game of Mortal Kombat or one of its home console ports to reexperience its mechanics and visual presentation, emulated nearly perfectly on current technology.

I allocated the majority of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, especially Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Many of the games here hold up, notably with local multiplayer matches. But playing against the aforementioned game's AI-controlled opponents is a demonstration of how basic and unjust the development approached in the franchise's pioneering releases. AI-managed characters obviously use unfair advantages or are otherwise dumb as rocks. Lacking another person to compete with — online play is available in numerous anthology releases, but somewhat limited in options — you'll be missing out.

Visual Options

The two dozen available combat games in the compilation, a blend of gaming hall, television, and mobile releases, are faithfully recreated, though I have noticed a handful slight anomalies — mainly control latency and the occasional bug, notably within Mortal Kombat 4. And while the games are largely presented as-is, the creators has added several intelligent convenience enhancements and display customization choices. As an illustration, you can choose to show each character's special moves on the display and opt to have endless periods to complete lethal techniques. Also included are choices for revealing concealed combatants, without having to perform some esoteric trick to access them.

Graphically, the titles can be enjoyed with multiple graphical effects and display options. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection provides highly authentic options that simulate the cathode-ray tube displays of gaming halls or home televisions, or the greenscale screen of a Nintendo handheld. An especially welcome feature is the setting to activate arcade-like bezels encircling the display, with the specific combat game you're playing precisely and gently mirroring against the simulated dark plastic edges. It's quite aesthetically pleasing.

Additional Features

The collection includes numerous welcome features besides the documentary and emulated arcade classics, containing a soundtrack mode that enables players to reexperience the soundtracks of different Mortal Kombat games without the din of combatants violently defeating each other. There are also character profiles that contain backgrounds and multiple story elements shown through arcade games' attract mode screens and final sequences.

Historical Preservation

Among the most significant features for hardcore Mortal Kombat fans is the opportunity to play a segment of previously unavailable content in the form 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 coin-op establishments. The Wavenet Edition of the game is virtually identical to UMK3, but provided the ability to challenge online opponents and contained several small bug fixes and balance. Yet this online edition never gained traction, in part