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This iconic fighting game continues to hold many hidden mysteries and the ability to amaze, well past its 30th anniversary after its original launch in arcades. This latest compilation spanning the brand's formative years, which includes a quartet of arcade releases, various home ports, and derivative games, is more than just a well-emulated series of classics including less celebrated releases — it additionally serves as a comprehensive historical account about the making of the legendary series.

As a dedicated devotee of the franchise who has closely monitored its creation and evolution, there was much to discover for me to understand and value about the series.

What Makes the Legacy Collection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection comparable to other vintage game anthologies from developer Digital Eclipse, part documentary, portion interactive museum. This compilation features emulated versions of the pioneering 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 spin-off titles, like combat-focused releases Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — some of the brand's least successful installments.

The Legacy Kollection is therefore not a highlight reel anthology, but an examination of the series' formative period, when the creators at Midway and franchise originators the creative duo behind the series were figuring out how to make a fighting game, produced using film material of real actors, as they went along. Watching the documentary — which includes historical videos, new interviews, and reproductions of classic advertisements, comics, and even company memos — it's astonishing to observe how Mortal Kombat went from simple starts to a worldwide phenomenon. It's genuinely amazing to see a group of young game developers, developing without clear direction or guidance, focus their cultural enthusiasms into creating a legendary video game series.

Educational Component

The historical documentation of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection charts the rise of the fighting series and the developers' professional journeys at the currently closed Midway. It subsequently demonstrates how those same creators contended with how to routinely one-up themselves, encountering significant pressure to repeat their triumphs. It's a fascinating time capsule constructed using analog films and analog photographs and manual drawings, which showcase the DIY nature of the franchise's production method and how personal recommendations helped circulate its mysteries and hidden aspects of Mortal Kombat in its arcade heyday. Presented in manageable segments, it's an eminently watchable series of documentary shorts that includes titles, illustrated stories, cinematic adaptations and even the comical physical events. The compilation also contains some unused moves and game character images among its previously unreleased material.

Playable Component

Interspersed along the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are opportunities to engage with the actual titles. At certain intervals, users can directly access a combat game session or a console adaptation to reexperience its mechanics and visual presentation, simulated with remarkable precision on current technology.

I allocated the majority of my time playing the arcade classics, particularly Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Numerous titles here hold up, particularly during local multiplayer matches. However, facing the artificial intelligence fighters in these releases is a reminder of how crude and unbalanced the coding existed in the series' initial installments. CPU-controlled opponents blatantly cheat to win or are otherwise dumb as rocks. If you don't have someone to play against — internet multiplayer exists in the majority of included games, but somewhat limited in options — you'll miss the full enjoyment.

Display Features

The two dozen available combat games in the compilation, a mix of gaming hall, television, and mobile releases, are faithfully recreated, though I detected a couple minor issues — primarily delayed responses and sporadic glitches, especially with Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are mostly shown in their original form, developer Digital Eclipse has included some smart quality-of-life features and visual presentation options. For instance, you can choose to display fighter-specific techniques during gameplay and choose to enable unlimited duration to complete lethal techniques. There are also options for unlocking secret characters, without having to perform obscure techniques to access them.

Graphically, the titles can be enjoyed with multiple visual enhancements and presentation styles. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection includes remarkably accurate effects that reproduce the cathode-ray tube displays of coin-op establishments or domestic TVs, or the monochrome green display of a Game Boy. A notably appreciated element is the setting to activate gaming hall-style borders encircling the display, with the specific combat game you're playing accurately and softly reflecting against the artificial ebony plastic frames. It's very artistically charming.

Bonus Elements

The collection includes numerous appreciated elements beyond the documentary and emulated arcade classics, featuring an audio component that allows users to rediscover the music from multiple combat titles without the din of combatants violently defeating each other. Additionally included are combatant descriptions that include bios and the various bits of lore displayed via the demo sequences of coin-op titles and endings.

Archival Discovery

A particularly notable inclusion 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 specific release, a somewhat revised iteration of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an pioneering effort from the developer at one-on-one internet-based play in arcades. The online-enabled release of the game is practically indistinguishable to UMK3, but provided the ability to challenge online opponents and contained several small glitch repairs and refinements. Yet this online edition didn't find widespread adoption, in part