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

This iconic fighting game still possesses many hidden mysteries and the power to astonish, more than 30 years after its first appearance in gaming halls. This latest compilation including the brand's formative years, featuring a quartet of arcade releases, several home system versions, and related titles, goes beyond just a well-emulated set of legendary games along with lesser-known entries — it functions as a detailed chronicle about the making of the legendary series.

Being a long-time Mortal Kombat fan who has closely monitored its development and progression, there was plenty new for me to learn and appreciate about the series.

What Makes the Historical Compilation

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection comparable to previous classic compilations from developer Digital Eclipse, portion educational film, portion interactive museum. This compilation features simulated releases 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 series' ventures at spinoffs, like combat-focused releases Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — some of the brand's most criticized releases.

The Legacy Kollection is therefore not a highlight reel anthology, but a study of the series' formative period, when the development team Midway and franchise originators the visionary developers were determining how to make a fighting game, produced using film material of real actors, through experimentation. Observing the archival material — containing vintage recordings, recent conversations, and reproductions of classic advertisements, comics, and including internal communications — it's astonishing to observe how Mortal Kombat went from simple starts to a global sensation. It's genuinely amazing to observe several early video game creators, operating with virtually no plan or guidance, channel their pop-culture interests into birthing an iconic game franchise.

Historical Section

The educational segment of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection traces the growth of Mortal Kombat and its creators' careers at the currently closed Midway. It further illustrates how those same creators addressed how to regularly outdo their previous work, encountering significant demand to replicate their achievements. It represents an intriguing historical record made from video recordings and film-based pictures and manual drawings, which showcase the DIY nature of the franchise's production method and how oral tradition helped spread its rumors and hidden aspects of Mortal Kombat in its peak period in gaming halls. Delivered in easily digestible portions, it's highly engaging collection of mini-documentaries that includes titles, illustrated stories, cinematic adaptations and even the silly live-action tour. It also includes some unused moves and character sprites among its cutting-room-floor content.

Interactive Experience

Interspersed along the five-segment historical film's chronology are invitations to experience the games themselves. At certain intervals, audience members can jump into a Mortal Kombat title or a console adaptation to reexperience its mechanics and artistic style, simulated with remarkable precision on current technology.

I allocated the majority of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, especially Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Many of the games here stand the test of time, notably with direct competitive sessions. Yet competing with the artificial intelligence fighters in these releases is a demonstration of how basic and unbalanced the development approached in the franchise's pioneering releases. AI-managed characters clearly employ dishonest tactics or are otherwise dumb as rocks. Without having someone to play against — online play is available in numerous anthology releases, but rather basic in functionality — the experience will be incomplete.

Display Features

The two dozen available combat games in the anthology, a combination of arcade, console, and handheld games, are precisely simulated, though I've observed a few small quirks — mainly control latency and sporadic glitches, especially with Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are largely presented as-is, developer Digital Eclipse has included some smart user experience improvements and visual presentation options. For example, you can choose to show each character's special moves on the display and opt to have unlimited duration to complete lethal techniques. Also included are choices for revealing concealed combatants, without having to perform complicated methods to access them.

Graphically, the titles can be enjoyed with multiple filters and visual treatments. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection includes remarkably accurate options that simulate the cathode-ray tube displays of arcades or domestic TVs, or the greenscale screen of a Game Boy. A notably appreciated element is the setting to activate gaming hall-style borders surrounding the screen, with your selected Mortal Kombat title precisely and gently mirroring against the simulated dark plastic edges. It's very artistically charming.

Extra Content

The collection includes numerous appreciated elements beyond the educational material and simulated classic games, including a music player that lets you revisit the tunes of various fighting releases absent the noise of fighters brutally eliminating opponents. Also present are character profiles that contain backgrounds and multiple story elements displayed via arcade games' attract mode screens and endings.

Lost Media Recovery

A particularly notable inclusion for committed franchise followers is the opportunity to play a segment of previously unavailable content in the form of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This version of the game, a somewhat revised iteration of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an pioneering effort from the developer at one-on-one internet-based play in coin-op establishments. The online-enabled release of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but featured the capability to challenge online opponents and contained several small error corrections and adjustments. But the Wavenet update never gained traction, in part