Mortal Kombat's Legacy Kollection: A Stunning Success for the Fighting Game Series

Mortal Kombat retains its share of secrets and the capacity to surprise, over three decades after its original launch in coin-op establishments. A new collection covering the brand's formative years, comprising four original arcade titles, several home system versions, and spinoffs, is more than just a well-emulated collection of iconic titles and not-so-classics — it functions as a rich documentary about the development 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 understand and value about the series.

What Defines the Legacy Collection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like other retro collections from the development team Digital Eclipse, part documentary, portion interactive museum. This compilation features digitally recreated editions of the first 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 derivative games, like action-oriented titles Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — two of the franchise's most criticized releases.

The Legacy Kollection thus isn't a greatest hits compilation, but a study of the series' formative period, when developer Midway and series co-creators the visionary developers were figuring out how to make a fighting game, digitized from footage of live performers, as they went along. Watching the documentary — that features vintage recordings, contemporary discussions, and scans of old flyers, illustrated stories, and even company memos — it's incredible to witness how the franchise evolved from modest origins to a global sensation. It's genuinely amazing to observe several pioneering developers, operating with virtually no plan or guidance, direct their entertainment passions into creating a legendary video game series.

Documentary Portion

The educational segment of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection traces the growth of the combat franchise and its creators' careers at the currently closed Midway. It further illustrates how those same creators contended with how to routinely one-up themselves, encountering significant demand to replicate their success. It represents an intriguing historical record composed of analog films and film-based pictures and pencil sketches, which showcase the DIY nature of the series' creation process and how oral tradition helped circulate its mysteries and hidden aspects of Mortal Kombat in its golden era in coin-op establishments. Delivered in easily digestible portions, it's an eminently watchable series of documentary shorts that includes titles, illustrated stories, cinematic adaptations and even the silly live-action tour. The collection additionally features some unreleased actions and digital fighter representations among its cutting-room-floor content.

Interactive Gaming

Interspersed along the five-segment historical film's chronology are opportunities to engage with the original releases. At certain intervals, viewers can hop into a combat game session or a console adaptation to reexperience its mechanics and visual presentation, emulated nearly perfectly on contemporary systems.

I dedicated most of my time playing the arcade classics, specifically Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Many of the games here remain enjoyable, notably with local multiplayer matches. However, facing the computer-controlled adversaries in these titles is a demonstration of how basic and unfair the coding existed in early Mortal Kombat games. CPU-controlled opponents blatantly cheat to win or are otherwise dumb as rocks. Lacking someone to play against — online play is available in numerous anthology releases, but too light on features — the experience will be incomplete.

Visual Options

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the collection, a mix of gaming hall, television, and mobile releases, are accurately emulated, though I've observed a handful slight anomalies — primarily delayed responses and intermittent errors, especially with Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are largely presented as-is, developer Digital Eclipse has included some smart convenience enhancements and visual presentation options. For instance, you can choose to reveal combatant-unique actions on-screen and choose to enable unlimited duration to perform a Fatality. There are also options for unlocking secret characters, without having to perform obscure techniques to obtain them.

Graphically, the titles can be enjoyed with multiple visual enhancements and presentation styles. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection offers very realistic filters that mimic the cathode-ray tube displays of gaming halls or home televisions, or the greenscale screen of a portable gaming device. A notably appreciated element 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 quite aesthetically pleasing.

Additional Features

There are plenty of nice touches beyond the documentary and emulated arcade classics, including a music player that lets you revisit the music from multiple Mortal Kombat games without the din of combatants violently defeating each other. There are also fighter biographies that feature histories and numerous narrative components displayed via the demo sequences of coin-op titles and endings.

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 guise 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 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 compete against internet adversaries and featured various slight bug fixes and balance. However, this network version failed to achieve popularity, in part