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The Mortal Kombat series retains its share of secrets and the power to astonish, over three decades after its initial debut in coin-op establishments. A new collection spanning the franchise's earliest days, featuring four arcade games, various home ports, and derivative games, transcends just a well-emulated set of legendary games including less celebrated releases — it functions as a comprehensive historical account about the making of the iconic franchise.

Being a long-time 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 Collection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection similar to other vintage game anthologies from developer Digital Eclipse, portion educational film, portion interactive museum. The anthology contains simulated releases 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 collection even includes the brand's experiments at spinoffs, 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 consequently doesn't represent a “best of” collection, but a study of Mortal Kombat's early days, when developer Midway and brand founders Ed Boon and John Tobias were figuring out how to create a combat title, digitized from footage of actual people, through experimentation. Observing the archival material — containing archival footage, recent conversations, and scans of old flyers, illustrated stories, and including internal communications — it's remarkable to see how the series transformed from humble beginnings to a global sensation. It's genuinely amazing to observe several early video game creators, working with minimal planning or oversight, channel their pop-culture interests into creating a legendary video game series.

Educational Component

The educational segment of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection documents the ascent of the fighting series and the founders' vocational paths at the no-longer-operating Midway. It then goes on to show how these identical developers contended with how to routinely one-up themselves, encountering significant demand to replicate their success. It serves as a compelling period piece composed of VHS tapes and traditional photos and hand-drawn illustrations, which reveal the self-made character of the series' creation process and how oral tradition helped disseminate its secrets and hidden aspects of Mortal Kombat in its peak period in gaming halls. Presented in manageable segments, it's thoroughly enjoyable collection of mini-documentaries that spans games, comics, films and even the silly live-action tour. The compilation also contains some unused moves and game character images among its previously unreleased material.

Interactive Gaming

Placed within the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are invitations to experience the actual titles. At various points, viewers can hop into a game of Mortal Kombat or one of its home console ports to reexperience its mechanics and artistic style, emulated nearly perfectly on current technology.

I allocated the majority of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, particularly Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Many of the games here remain enjoyable, especially in one-on-one local play. However, facing the computer-controlled adversaries in these titles is a reminder of how crude and unjust the coding existed in the franchise's pioneering releases. AI-managed characters clearly employ dishonest tactics or are alternatively incredibly stupid. If you don't have another person to compete with — network gaming is included in numerous anthology releases, but too light on features — you'll be missing out.

Display Features

The 23 playable Mortal Kombat games in the collection, a mix of coin-op, home system, and portable titles, are accurately emulated, though I have noticed a couple minor issues — mainly control latency and the occasional bug, particularly in Mortal Kombat 4. And while the games are mostly shown in their original form, developer Digital Eclipse has added several intelligent user experience improvements and graphical adjustment settings. As an illustration, you can choose to reveal combatant-unique actions on-screen and choose to enable infinite time to perform a Fatality. Also included are choices for accessing hidden fighters, without having to perform complicated methods to access them.

Visually, the games can be experienced with numerous filters and visual treatments. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection provides highly authentic options that simulate the cathode-ray tube displays of arcades or household displays, or the monochrome green display of a Game Boy. A notably appreciated element is the option to have arcade-like bezels surrounding the screen, with your selected Mortal Kombat title accurately and softly reflecting against the simulated dark plastic edges. It's very artistically charming.

Extra Content

The collection includes numerous welcome features besides the educational material and simulated classic games, including a music player that enables players to reexperience the music from multiple combat titles excluding the sounds of fighters brutally eliminating opponents. Additionally included are combatant descriptions that include bios and the various bits of lore shown through arcade games' attract mode screens and conclusions.

Historical Preservation

A particularly notable inclusion for dedicated series enthusiasts is the opportunity to play a segment of previously unavailable content in the format of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This specific release, a moderately improved edition of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an initial venture by the company at one-on-one internet-based play in arcades. This network version of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but featured the capability to battle network competitors and contained several small bug fixes and balance. However, this network version didn't find widespread adoption, in part