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The Mortal Kombat series continues to hold its share of secrets and the capacity to surprise, well past its 30th anniversary after its initial debut in coin-op establishments. The recent anthology covering the brand's formative years, comprising four arcade games, various home ports, and derivative games, transcends just a well-emulated set of legendary games and not-so-classics — it functions as a detailed chronicle about the development of the renowned brand.

As a dedicated enthusiast of the series who has closely monitored its development and progression, there was numerous fresh aspects for me to discover and admire about the series.

What Constitutes the Historical Compilation

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection comparable to other retro collections from the creators at Digital Eclipse, part historical documentation, part playable archive. The anthology contains emulated versions of the first arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, including television and mobile versions of several of these titles. This compilation also features the brand's experiments at derivative games, like action games Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — two of the franchise's most criticized releases.

The Legacy Kollection consequently doesn't represent a “best of” collection, but an examination of the series' formative period, when developer Midway and franchise originators the creative duo behind the series were discovering methods to develop a battle series, produced using film material of real actors, on the fly. Watching the documentary — which includes archival footage, contemporary discussions, and reproductions of classic advertisements, comics, and including internal communications — it's incredible to witness how Mortal Kombat went from simple starts to a worldwide phenomenon. It's genuinely amazing to see a group of pioneering developers, working with minimal planning or guidance, channel their pop-culture interests into establishing an enduring gaming brand.

Historical Section

The educational segment of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection charts the rise of the combat franchise and the developers' professional journeys at the currently closed Midway. It further illustrates how those same creators contended with how to routinely one-up themselves, experiencing considerable stress to duplicate their success. It represents an intriguing historical record made from VHS tapes and film-based pictures and pencil sketches, which demonstrate the hands-on approach of the franchise's production method and how word of mouth helped spread its rumors and undisclosed elements of the series in its arcade heyday. Told in bite-sized chunks, it's highly engaging series of documentary shorts that includes titles, illustrated stories, cinematic adaptations and even the comical physical events. The collection additionally features some unused moves and character sprites among its archived development assets.

Interactive Experience

Distributed throughout the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are invitations to experience the original releases. At various points, audience members can jump into a game of Mortal Kombat or a home system version to rediscover its combat system and graphics, emulated nearly perfectly on modern hardware.

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. Several releases here hold up, particularly during local multiplayer matches. But playing against the computer-controlled adversaries in these titles is a demonstration of how basic and unfair the programming was in the series' initial installments. CPU-controlled opponents obviously use unfair advantages or are conversely remarkably unintelligent. Without having another person to compete with — network gaming is included in the majority of included games, but somewhat limited in options — the experience will be incomplete.

Visual Options

The 23 playable Mortal Kombat games in the compilation, a blend of coin-op, home system, and portable titles, are faithfully recreated, though I detected a handful slight anomalies — mostly input lag and the occasional bug, especially with Mortal Kombat 4. And while the games are largely presented as-is, the development team has added several intelligent quality-of-life features and display customization choices. For instance, users can elect to display fighter-specific techniques during gameplay and select to activate endless periods to perform a Fatality. Also included are choices for unlocking secret characters, without having to perform obscure techniques to access them.

Visually, the games can be played with a variety of visual enhancements and presentation styles. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection provides highly authentic filters that mimic the CRT monitors of coin-op establishments or household displays, or the monochrome green display of a portable gaming device. An especially welcome feature is the setting to activate coin-op-inspired frames surrounding the screen, with your selected Mortal Kombat title faithfully and subtly duplicating against the artificial ebony plastic frames. It's quite aesthetically pleasing.

Bonus Elements

Players will discover multiple welcome features besides the historical footage and recreated vintage titles, containing a soundtrack mode 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 fighter biographies that contain backgrounds and multiple story elements shown through arcade games' attract mode screens and endings.

Lost Media Recovery

One of the biggest highlights for hardcore Mortal Kombat fans is the ability to access a segment of previously unavailable content in the guise of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This version of the game, a somewhat revised iteration of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an early attempt by Midway at one-on-one internet-based play 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 included some minor error corrections and adjustments. But the Wavenet update never gained traction, in part