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Mortal Kombat still possesses numerous undisclosed elements and the power to astonish, more than 30 years after its initial debut in gaming halls. The recent anthology covering the brand's formative years, featuring a quartet of arcade releases, various home ports, and derivative games, goes beyond just a well-emulated series of classics and not-so-classics — it additionally serves as a detailed chronicle about the making of the legendary series.

Even as a lifelong enthusiast of the series who has paid close attention its creation and evolution, there was much to discover for me to understand and value about the series.

What Defines the Historical Compilation

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection comparable to other vintage game anthologies from the creators at Digital Eclipse, part documentary, part playable archive. The collection includes emulated versions of the original 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 brand's experiments at derivative games, like combat-focused releases Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — among the series' least successful installments.

The Legacy Kollection thus isn't a greatest hits compilation, but an examination of the series' formative period, when the development team Midway and series co-creators Ed Boon and John Tobias were figuring out how to create a combat title, created from video recordings of real actors, through experimentation. Viewing the historical footage — which includes vintage recordings, new interviews, and digital copies of vintage posters, illustrated stories, and even interoffice faxes — it's remarkable to see how Mortal Kombat went from modest origins to a global sensation. It's frankly astounding to see a group of pioneering developers, working with minimal planning or guidance, focus their cultural enthusiasms into birthing an iconic game franchise.

Educational Component

The educational segment of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection charts the rise of the combat franchise and its creators' careers at the now-defunct Midway. It then goes on to show how these identical developers reckoned with how to routinely one-up themselves, encountering significant stress to duplicate their achievements. It represents an intriguing historical record composed of video recordings and analog photographs and manual drawings, which reveal the self-made character 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 an eminently watchable series of documentary shorts that covers video games, graphic novels, movies and even the comical physical events. The compilation also contains some unreleased actions and character sprites among its archived development assets.

Playable Component

Placed within the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are prompts to play the actual titles. At certain intervals, viewers can hop into a Mortal Kombat title or a console adaptation to revisit its gameplay and artistic style, emulated nearly perfectly on current technology.

I allocated the majority of my time experiencing the original arcade titles, especially Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Several releases here hold up, particularly during one-on-one local play. Yet competing with the artificial intelligence fighters in these releases is a demonstration of how basic and unjust the development approached in the series' initial installments. CPU-controlled opponents obviously use unfair advantages or are conversely remarkably unintelligent. If you don't have someone to play against — online play is available in numerous anthology releases, but somewhat limited in options — you'll be missing out.

Visual Options

The two dozen available combat games in the anthology, a blend of gaming hall, television, and mobile releases, are precisely simulated, though I detected a handful slight anomalies — primarily delayed responses and intermittent errors, notably within Mortal Kombat 4. Although the titles are largely presented as-is, the creators has added several intelligent quality-of-life features and graphical adjustment settings. For instance, users can elect to reveal combatant-unique actions during gameplay and choose to enable unlimited duration to complete lethal techniques. Additionally available are settings for unlocking secret characters, without having to perform obscure techniques to unlock them.

Graphically, the titles can be experienced with numerous graphical effects and display options. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection offers very realistic effects that reproduce the cathode-ray tube displays of arcades or home televisions, or the greenscale screen of a Nintendo handheld. A notably appreciated element is the option to have coin-op-inspired frames surrounding the screen, with the specific combat game you're playing accurately and softly reflecting against the faux black plastic borders. It's quite aesthetically pleasing.

Bonus Elements

Players will discover multiple welcome features besides the documentary and emulated arcade classics, containing a soundtrack mode that enables players to reexperience the music from multiple fighting releases without the din of two kombatants viciously slaughtering each other. There are also character profiles that contain backgrounds and the various bits of lore shown through arcade games' attract mode screens and final sequences.

Archival Discovery

A particularly notable inclusion for hardcore Mortal Kombat fans is the ability to access a example of historically missing material in the guise of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This version of the game, a slightly updated version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an initial venture by the company at head-to-head network battles in coin-op establishments. The Wavenet Edition of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but included the option to battle network competitors and included some minor bug fixes and balance. But the Wavenet update failed to achieve popularity, in part