Mortal Kombat's Legacy Kollection: A Near-Flawless Victory for the Combat Series Series

This iconic fighting game continues to hold many hidden mysteries and the power to astonish, more than 30 years after its first appearance in arcades. This latest compilation covering the series' initial period, featuring a quartet of arcade releases, several home system versions, and spinoffs, is more than just a well-emulated set of legendary games including less celebrated releases — it functions as a rich documentary about the development of the renowned brand.

Even as a lifelong devotee of the franchise who has paid close attention its creation and evolution, there was plenty new for me to understand and value about the series.

What Defines the Historical Compilation

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like previous classic compilations from developer Digital Eclipse, part documentary, part playable archive. The collection includes digitally recreated editions of the pioneering arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, plus console and handheld ports of several of these titles. The anthology additionally contains the franchise's attempts at derivative games, like combat-focused releases 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 “best of” collection, but a study of the series' formative period, when the creators at Midway and brand founders Ed Boon and John Tobias were determining how to develop a battle series, produced using film material of real actors, through experimentation. Observing the archival material — which includes historical videos, recent conversations, and reproductions of classic advertisements, graphic novels, and including internal communications — it's astonishing to observe how Mortal Kombat went from humble beginnings to a worldwide phenomenon. It's truly remarkable to observe several early video game creators, developing without clear direction or oversight, focus their cultural enthusiasms into establishing an enduring gaming brand.

Documentary Portion

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection documents the ascent of the fighting series and the founders' vocational paths at the now-defunct Midway. It further illustrates how the very same individuals reckoned with how to routinely one-up themselves, facing no small amount of demand to replicate their success. It's a fascinating time capsule made from VHS tapes and traditional photos and pencil sketches, which reveal the self-made character of Mortal Kombat's development and how word of mouth helped spread its rumors and secrets of MK in its arcade heyday. Told in bite-sized chunks, it's an eminently watchable collection of mini-documentaries that covers video games, graphic novels, movies and even the comical physical events. The compilation also contains some never-implemented techniques and digital fighter representations among its archived development assets.

Interactive Gaming

Interspersed along the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are invitations to experience the original releases. At various points, audience members can jump into a Mortal Kombat title or a home system version to rediscover its combat system and graphics, recreated with impressive accuracy on current technology.

I spent the bulk of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, especially Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Numerous titles here stand the test of time, notably with one-on-one local play. But playing against the artificial intelligence fighters in these releases is a testament to how primitive and unjust the coding existed in early Mortal Kombat games. Computer-directed fighters blatantly cheat to win or are conversely remarkably unintelligent. Lacking a human opponent — online play is available in numerous anthology releases, but too light on features — you'll be missing out.

Display Features

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the collection, a combination of arcade, console, and handheld games, are accurately emulated, though I've observed a handful slight anomalies — mostly input lag and sporadic glitches, particularly in Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are largely presented as-is, the development team has included some smart quality-of-life features and visual presentation options. For example, users can elect to show each character's special moves during gameplay and opt to have unlimited duration to execute finishing moves. There are also options for unlocking secret characters, removing the requirement to complete complicated methods to unlock them.

Graphically, the titles can be played with a variety of graphical effects and display options. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection includes remarkably accurate filters that mimic the traditional television screens of arcades or domestic TVs, or the greenscale screen of a Game Boy. An especially welcome feature is the setting to activate coin-op-inspired frames framing the gameplay, with the MK game of your choice precisely and gently mirroring against the simulated dark plastic edges. It's remarkably visually appealing.

Bonus Elements

The collection includes numerous appreciated elements beyond the historical footage and recreated vintage titles, including a music player that lets you revisit the soundtracks of different combat titles excluding the sounds of two kombatants viciously slaughtering each other. There are also combatant descriptions that feature histories and the various bits of lore displayed via the idle displays of gaming hall releases and endings.

Lost Media Recovery

One of the biggest highlights for dedicated series enthusiasts is the chance to experience a piece of "lost media" in the format of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This version of the game, a moderately improved edition of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an initial venture by the company at direct online competitive gaming in coin-op establishments. The online-enabled release of the game is practically indistinguishable to UMK3, but featured the capability to challenge online opponents and contained several small glitch repairs and refinements. However, this network version didn't find widespread adoption, in part