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This iconic fighting game retains many hidden mysteries and the capacity to surprise, over three decades after its initial debut in gaming halls. This latest compilation including the brand's formative years, which includes four arcade games, several home system versions, and spinoffs, goes beyond just a well-emulated collection of iconic titles and not-so-classics — it's also a rich documentary about the creation of the legendary series.

Even as a lifelong Mortal Kombat fan who has closely monitored its creation and evolution, there was much to discover for me to understand and value about the series.

What Defines the Historical Compilation

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection similar to other vintage game anthologies from the creators at Digital Eclipse, portion educational film, portion interactive museum. The collection includes digitally recreated editions of the pioneering 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. 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 — among the series' worst entries.

The Legacy Kollection consequently doesn't represent a “best of” collection, but an exploration into the series' formative period, when the development team Midway and brand founders Ed Boon and John Tobias were figuring out how to develop a battle series, digitized from footage of actual people, through experimentation. Viewing the historical footage — that features historical videos, recent conversations, and digital copies of vintage posters, comics, and including internal communications — it's incredible to witness how the series transformed from simple starts to a global sensation. It's frankly astounding to see a group of early video game creators, 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 Mortal Kombat and the founders' vocational paths at the no-longer-operating Midway. It then goes on to show how those same creators contended with how to routinely one-up themselves, encountering significant stress to duplicate their success. It's a fascinating time capsule composed of analog films and traditional photos and manual drawings, which reveal the self-made character of Mortal Kombat's development and how oral tradition helped disseminate its secrets and undisclosed elements of the series in its golden era in coin-op establishments. Presented in manageable segments, it's an eminently watchable collection of mini-documentaries that covers video games, graphic novels, movies and even the silly live-action tour. It also includes some never-implemented techniques and digital fighter representations among its archived development assets.

Interactive Experience

Distributed throughout the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are prompts to play the games themselves. At certain intervals, audience members can jump into a game of Mortal Kombat or a console adaptation to rediscover its combat system and visual presentation, recreated with impressive accuracy on modern hardware.

I dedicated most of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, specifically Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Many of the games here remain enjoyable, notably with local multiplayer matches. But playing against the aforementioned game's AI-controlled opponents is a testament to how primitive and unjust the development approached in the franchise's pioneering releases. AI-managed characters clearly employ dishonest tactics or are alternatively incredibly stupid. Lacking a human opponent — network gaming is included in most titles in the collection, but too light on features — you'll miss the full enjoyment.

Visual Options

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the anthology, a mix of gaming hall, television, and mobile releases, are accurately emulated, though I detected a couple minor issues — mainly control latency and sporadic glitches, notably within Mortal Kombat 4. Although the titles are largely presented as-is, developer Digital Eclipse has incorporated various clever quality-of-life features and display customization choices. For instance, users can elect to display fighter-specific techniques during gameplay and choose to enable endless periods to execute finishing moves. Additionally available are settings for unlocking secret characters, without having to perform obscure techniques to access them.

Visually, the games can be experienced with numerous visual enhancements and presentation styles. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection provides highly authentic effects that reproduce the traditional television screens of gaming halls or home televisions, or the limited color monitor of a portable gaming device. A particularly nice touch is the option to have arcade-like bezels 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.

Extra Content

The collection includes numerous nice touches beyond the educational material and simulated classic games, including a music player that enables players to reexperience the music from multiple Mortal Kombat games excluding the sounds of two kombatants viciously slaughtering each other. There are also combatant descriptions that include bios and multiple story elements displayed via the demo sequences of coin-op titles and conclusions.

Archival Discovery

One of the biggest highlights for dedicated series enthusiasts is the opportunity to play a piece of "lost media" in the guise 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 direct online competitive gaming in gaming halls. This network version of the game is practically indistinguishable to UMK3, but included the option to battle network competitors and featured various slight error corrections and adjustments. But the Wavenet update failed to achieve popularity, in part