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

This iconic fighting game retains numerous undisclosed elements and the power to astonish, over three decades after its first appearance in coin-op establishments. The recent anthology covering the brand's formative years, featuring four original arcade titles, various home ports, and related titles, goes beyond simply a faithfully reproduced collection of iconic titles including less celebrated releases — it's also a rich documentary about the creation of the renowned brand.

As a dedicated devotee of the franchise who has paid close attention its creation and evolution, there was much to discover for me to discover and admire about the series.

What Constitutes the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection similar to previous classic compilations from the development team Digital Eclipse, part historical documentation, part playable archive. The anthology contains simulated releases of the original arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, including television and mobile versions of several of these titles. The anthology additionally contains the brand's experiments at spin-off titles, like action games 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 a study of the franchise's initial era, when the creators at Midway and series co-creators the visionary developers were figuring out how to create a combat title, created from video recordings of actual people, as they went along. Watching the documentary — that features archival footage, recent conversations, and digital copies of vintage posters, illustrated stories, and even interoffice faxes — it's incredible to witness how Mortal Kombat went from modest origins to a international craze. It's genuinely amazing to see a group of pioneering developers, working with minimal planning or oversight, channel their pop-culture interests into creating a legendary video game series.

Educational Component

The historical documentation of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection documents the ascent of Mortal Kombat and the founders' vocational paths at the currently closed Midway. It further illustrates how these identical developers addressed how to regularly outdo their previous work, encountering significant pressure to repeat their achievements. It represents an intriguing historical record made from VHS tapes and analog photographs and manual drawings, which showcase the DIY nature of the franchise's production method and how oral tradition helped spread its rumors and secrets of MK in its arcade heyday. Told in bite-sized chunks, it's an eminently watchable collection of mini-documentaries that spans games, comics, films and including the humorous real-world tour. The collection additionally features some never-implemented techniques and digital fighter representations among its cutting-room-floor content.

Interactive Experience

Placed within the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are prompts to play the original releases. During specific moments, viewers can hop into a combat game session or one of its home console ports to rediscover its combat system and graphics, simulated with remarkable precision on contemporary systems.

I dedicated most of my time experiencing the original arcade titles, especially 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 unbalanced the coding existed in the franchise's pioneering releases. Computer-directed fighters clearly employ dishonest tactics or are otherwise dumb as rocks. If you don't have someone to play against — network gaming is included in most titles in the collection, but too light on features — you'll miss the full enjoyment.

Display Features

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the compilation, a mix of coin-op, home system, and portable titles, are accurately emulated, though I've observed a couple minor issues — mostly input lag and the occasional bug, especially with Mortal Kombat 4. Although the titles are primarily displayed authentically, the creators has incorporated various clever user experience improvements and display customization choices. For instance, players have the option to reveal combatant-unique actions on the display and choose to enable unlimited duration to execute finishing moves. Also included are choices for unlocking secret characters, removing the requirement to complete obscure techniques to access them.

Graphically, the titles can be experienced with numerous graphical effects and display options. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection provides highly authentic filters that mimic the cathode-ray tube displays of gaming halls or home televisions, or the monochrome green display of a Game Boy. An especially welcome feature is the option to have arcade-like bezels encircling the display, with your selected Mortal Kombat title faithfully and subtly duplicating against the faux black plastic borders. It's quite aesthetically pleasing.

Extra Content

The collection includes numerous nice touches beyond the educational material and simulated classic games, featuring an audio component that allows users to rediscover the music from multiple combat titles without the din of combatants violently defeating each other. There are also combatant descriptions that feature histories and multiple story elements presented by the idle displays of gaming hall releases and conclusions.

Archival Discovery

A particularly notable inclusion for hardcore Mortal Kombat fans is the opportunity to play a piece of "lost media" in the form of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This version of the game, a slightly updated version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an pioneering effort from the developer at head-to-head network battles in gaming halls. The Wavenet Edition of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but included the option to challenge online opponents and contained several small glitch repairs and refinements. Yet this online edition failed to achieve popularity, in part