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The Mortal Kombat series continues to hold its share of secrets and the capacity to surprise, over three decades after its first appearance in gaming halls. This latest compilation spanning the brand's formative years, featuring a quartet of arcade releases, multiple console adaptations, and derivative games, goes beyond simply a faithfully reproduced series of classics along with lesser-known entries — it additionally serves as a rich documentary about the making of the iconic franchise.

As a dedicated devotee of the franchise who has paid close attention its origins and transformation, there was numerous fresh aspects for me to learn and appreciate about the series.

What Constitutes the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like other vintage game anthologies from the development team Digital Eclipse, portion educational film, part playable archive. The anthology contains emulated versions of the first arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, plus console and handheld ports of some of those games. The collection even includes the franchise's attempts at derivative games, like action-oriented titles Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — among the series' most criticized releases.

The Legacy Kollection thus isn't a greatest hits compilation, but an examination of the series' formative period, when the creators at Midway and brand founders the creative duo behind the series were discovering methods to develop a battle series, produced using film material of actual people, on the fly. Observing the archival material — containing historical videos, recent conversations, and scans of old flyers, comics, and even company memos — it's astonishing to observe how Mortal Kombat went from simple starts to a international craze. It's frankly astounding to watch a handful of early video game creators, operating with virtually no plan or guidance, focus their cultural enthusiasms into creating a legendary video game series.

Documentary Portion

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection charts the rise of Mortal Kombat and its creators' careers at the now-defunct Midway. It subsequently demonstrates how those same creators addressed how to regularly outdo their previous work, facing no small amount of pressure to repeat their achievements. It's a fascinating time capsule composed of analog films 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 undisclosed elements of the series in its arcade heyday. Delivered in easily digestible portions, it's thoroughly enjoyable series of documentary shorts that includes titles, illustrated stories, cinematic adaptations and even the comical physical events. The compilation also contains some unreleased actions and digital fighter representations among its cutting-room-floor content.

Interactive Experience

Placed within the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are invitations to experience the actual titles. At certain intervals, users can directly access a Mortal Kombat title or a home system version to rediscover its combat system and artistic style, simulated with remarkable precision on current technology.

I dedicated most of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, particularly Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Several releases here remain enjoyable, especially in direct competitive sessions. However, facing the computer-controlled adversaries in these titles is a testament to how primitive and unbalanced the coding existed in the franchise's pioneering releases. AI-managed characters blatantly cheat to win or are alternatively incredibly stupid. 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.

Technical Presentation

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the compilation, a mix of arcade, console, and handheld games, are precisely simulated, though I detected a few small quirks — mainly control latency and intermittent errors, particularly in Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are mostly shown in their original form, developer Digital Eclipse has incorporated various clever quality-of-life features and graphical adjustment settings. For example, players have the option to display fighter-specific techniques on the display and choose to enable endless periods to complete lethal techniques. Also included are choices for unlocking secret characters, eliminating the need to execute complicated methods to unlock them.

Artistically, the releases can be enjoyed with multiple visual enhancements and presentation styles. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection offers very realistic options that simulate the traditional television screens of gaming halls or domestic TVs, or the greenscale screen of a portable gaming device. An especially welcome feature is the setting to activate arcade-like bezels framing the gameplay, with the specific combat game you're playing faithfully and subtly duplicating against the simulated dark plastic edges. It's very artistically charming.

Extra Content

Players will discover multiple nice touches beyond the documentary and emulated arcade classics, including a music player that lets you revisit the soundtracks of different fighting releases excluding the sounds of fighters brutally eliminating opponents. There are also combatant descriptions that contain backgrounds and multiple story elements shown through the demo sequences of coin-op titles and final sequences.

Lost Media Recovery

Among the most significant features for dedicated series enthusiasts is the ability to access a piece of "lost media" in the format 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 arcades. The Wavenet Edition of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but provided the ability to challenge online opponents and included some minor glitch repairs and refinements. But the Wavenet update failed to achieve popularity, in part