The Legacy Kollection of Mortal Kombat: An Almost Perfect Triumph for the Combat Series Franchise

Mortal Kombat retains many hidden mysteries and the capacity to surprise, more than 30 years after its initial debut in arcades. This latest compilation covering the franchise's earliest days, comprising a quartet of arcade releases, various home ports, and derivative games, goes beyond simply a faithfully reproduced set of legendary games and not-so-classics — it functions as a comprehensive historical account about the development of the renowned brand.

As a dedicated Mortal Kombat fan who has carefully followed its development and progression, there was plenty new for me to understand and value about the series.

What Constitutes the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection comparable to other vintage game anthologies from the development team Digital Eclipse, part historical documentation, 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 collection even includes the brand's experiments at spin-off titles, like action games 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 a study of the franchise's initial era, when the creators at Midway and series co-creators the creative duo behind the series were determining how to develop a battle series, digitized from footage of actual people, through experimentation. Watching the documentary — which includes historical videos, recent conversations, and digital copies of vintage posters, graphic novels, and including internal communications — it's astonishing to observe how the franchise evolved from simple starts to a international craze. It's frankly astounding to observe several pioneering developers, working with minimal planning or oversight, focus their cultural enthusiasms into birthing an iconic game franchise.

Educational Component

The educational segment of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection documents the ascent of the fighting series and the developers' professional journeys at the no-longer-operating Midway. It then goes on to show how the very same individuals contended with how to regularly outdo their previous work, encountering significant demand to replicate their success. It represents an intriguing historical record composed of analog films and analog photographs and manual drawings, which reveal the self-made character of the series' creation process and how personal recommendations helped circulate its mysteries and secrets of MK in its golden era in coin-op establishments. Presented in manageable segments, it's an eminently watchable series of documentary shorts that spans games, comics, films and including the humorous real-world tour. The compilation also contains some never-implemented techniques and digital fighter representations among its previously unreleased material.

Playable Component

Placed within 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, simulated with remarkable precision on current technology.

I dedicated most of my time experiencing the original arcade titles, especially Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Numerous titles here stand the test of time, notably with local multiplayer matches. Yet competing with the computer-controlled adversaries in these titles is a reminder of how crude and unjust the programming was in the franchise's pioneering releases. AI-managed characters clearly employ dishonest tactics or are conversely remarkably unintelligent. Without having another person to compete with — network gaming is included in most titles in the collection, but somewhat limited in options — the experience will be incomplete.

Display Features

The 23 playable Mortal Kombat games in the collection, a mix of coin-op, home system, and portable titles, are faithfully recreated, though I detected a couple minor issues — primarily delayed responses and intermittent errors, notably within Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are primarily displayed authentically, developer Digital Eclipse has incorporated various clever quality-of-life features and graphical adjustment settings. As an illustration, you can choose to show each character's special moves on the display and choose to enable unlimited duration to perform a Fatality. Additionally available are settings for accessing hidden fighters, without having to perform some esoteric trick to access them.

Artistically, the releases can be experienced with numerous filters and visual treatments. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection provides highly authentic filters that mimic the traditional television screens of coin-op establishments or home televisions, or the monochrome green display of a Game Boy. A particularly nice touch is the option to have gaming hall-style borders encircling the display, with your selected Mortal Kombat title precisely and gently mirroring against the simulated dark plastic edges. It's very artistically charming.

Extra Content

There are plenty of welcome features besides the educational material and simulated classic games, featuring an audio component that lets you revisit the tunes of various combat titles without the din of combatants violently defeating each other. Additionally included are combatant descriptions that feature histories and the various bits of lore displayed via the idle displays of gaming hall releases and final sequences.

Lost Media Recovery

One of the biggest highlights for hardcore Mortal Kombat fans is the opportunity to play a piece of "lost media" in the format of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This particular edition, a moderately improved edition of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an initial venture by the company at head-to-head network battles in coin-op establishments. The online-enabled release of the game is practically indistinguishable to UMK3, but featured the capability to battle network competitors and featured various slight bug fixes and balance. However, this network version never gained traction, in part