The Legacy Kollection of Mortal Kombat: A Stunning Success for the Fighting Game Brand

The Mortal Kombat series continues to hold its share of secrets and the ability to amaze, more than 30 years after its first appearance in arcades. The recent anthology including the brand's formative years, featuring four arcade games, several home system versions, and spinoffs, goes beyond just a well-emulated series of classics along with lesser-known entries — it functions as a rich documentary about the making of the iconic franchise.

As a dedicated devotee of the franchise who has carefully followed its creation and evolution, there was plenty new for me to discover and admire about the series.

What Constitutes the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like previous classic compilations from the creators at Digital Eclipse, part documentary, portion interactive museum. This compilation features simulated releases of the pioneering arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, including television and mobile versions of certain releases. This compilation also features the franchise's attempts at derivative games, like action games Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — some of the brand's worst entries.

The Legacy Kollection thus isn't a highlight reel anthology, but an exploration into the franchise's initial era, when developer Midway and franchise originators Ed Boon and John Tobias were determining how to make a fighting game, digitized from footage of actual people, on the fly. Observing the archival material — which includes historical videos, recent conversations, and reproductions of classic advertisements, illustrated stories, and even interoffice faxes — it's astonishing to observe how Mortal Kombat went from humble beginnings to a worldwide phenomenon. It's truly remarkable to see a group of young game developers, developing without clear direction or supervision, channel their pop-culture interests into establishing an enduring gaming brand.

Educational Component

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection documents the ascent of Mortal Kombat and the developers' professional journeys at the no-longer-operating Midway. It further illustrates how the very same individuals contended with how to routinely one-up themselves, experiencing considerable stress to duplicate their triumphs. It serves as a compelling period piece constructed using analog films and analog photographs and manual drawings, which reveal the self-made character of Mortal Kombat's development and how word of mouth helped disseminate its secrets and undisclosed elements of the series in its arcade heyday. Told in bite-sized chunks, it's thoroughly enjoyable series of documentary shorts that includes titles, illustrated stories, cinematic adaptations and even the silly live-action tour. The compilation also contains some never-implemented techniques and digital fighter representations among its previously unreleased material.

Interactive Gaming

Interspersed along the five-segment historical film's chronology are opportunities to engage with the actual titles. At various points, users can directly access a combat game session or a console adaptation to rediscover its combat system and artistic style, simulated with remarkable precision on current technology.

I dedicated most 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 remain enjoyable, especially in direct competitive sessions. Yet competing with the artificial intelligence fighters in these releases is a reminder of how crude and unfair the development approached in the franchise's pioneering releases. AI-managed characters blatantly cheat to win or are otherwise dumb as rocks. Without having a human opponent — online play is available in the majority of included games, but somewhat limited in options — you'll miss the full enjoyment.

Technical Presentation

The 23 playable Mortal Kombat games in the anthology, a blend of coin-op, home system, and portable titles, are faithfully recreated, though I have noticed a handful slight anomalies — primarily delayed responses and intermittent errors, notably within Mortal Kombat 4. Although the titles are mostly shown in their original form, the creators has added several intelligent convenience enhancements and display customization choices. As an illustration, you can choose to display fighter-specific techniques on-screen and select to activate infinite time to complete lethal techniques. Also included are choices for unlocking secret characters, removing the requirement to complete some esoteric trick to access them.

Visually, the games can be played with a variety of graphical effects and display options. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection offers very realistic options that simulate the cathode-ray tube displays of arcades or home televisions, or the greenscale screen of a Nintendo handheld. An especially welcome feature is the choice to enable coin-op-inspired frames framing the gameplay, with the specific combat game you're playing faithfully and subtly duplicating against the artificial ebony plastic frames. It's quite aesthetically pleasing.

Additional Features

There are plenty of nice touches beyond the documentary and emulated arcade classics, featuring an audio component that enables players to reexperience the soundtracks of different fighting releases absent the noise of combatants violently defeating each other. Also present are fighter biographies that include bios and numerous narrative components displayed via the demo sequences of coin-op titles and final sequences.

Lost Media Recovery

Among the most significant features for committed franchise followers is the chance to experience a piece of "lost media" 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 one-on-one internet-based play 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 contained several small glitch repairs and refinements. But the Wavenet update failed to achieve popularity, in part