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

Mortal Kombat retains its share of secrets and the capacity to surprise, over three decades after its original launch in coin-op establishments. The recent anthology including the brand's formative years, comprising a quartet of arcade releases, multiple console adaptations, and spinoffs, is more than simply a faithfully reproduced series of classics including less celebrated releases — it functions as a comprehensive historical account about the making of the iconic franchise.

As a dedicated Mortal Kombat fan who has closely monitored its creation and evolution, there was plenty new for me to understand and value about the series.

What Makes the Legacy Collection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like other retro collections from the development team Digital Eclipse, portion educational film, part playable archive. The collection includes simulated releases of the pioneering arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, plus console and handheld ports of several of these titles. The collection even includes the franchise's attempts at spinoffs, like action-oriented titles Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — two of the franchise's least successful installments.

The Legacy Kollection consequently doesn't represent a “best of” collection, but an exploration into Mortal Kombat's early days, when the development team Midway and franchise originators the creative duo behind the series were discovering methods to make a fighting game, produced using film material of live performers, as they went along. Watching the documentary — that features historical videos, contemporary discussions, and scans of old flyers, illustrated stories, and even company memos — it's remarkable to see how the franchise evolved from modest origins to a global sensation. It's truly remarkable to watch a handful of young game developers, developing without clear direction or supervision, focus their cultural enthusiasms into birthing an iconic game franchise.

Historical Section

The educational segment of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection charts the rise of the combat franchise and the developers' professional journeys at the currently closed Midway. It further illustrates how those same creators reckoned with how to regularly outdo their previous work, facing no small amount of pressure to repeat their triumphs. It's a fascinating time capsule composed of video recordings and traditional photos and pencil sketches, 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 golden era in coin-op establishments. Told in bite-sized chunks, it's highly engaging collection of mini-documentaries that covers video games, graphic novels, movies and even the comical physical events. The compilation also contains some never-implemented techniques and digital fighter representations among its archived development assets.

Interactive Gaming

Interspersed along the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are prompts to play the original releases. At various points, audience members can jump into a Mortal Kombat title or a console adaptation to reexperience its mechanics and visual presentation, simulated with remarkable precision on modern hardware.

I allocated the majority of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, particularly Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Many of the games here hold up, notably with local multiplayer matches. Yet competing with the computer-controlled adversaries in these titles is a reminder of how crude and unjust the coding existed in the franchise's pioneering releases. CPU-controlled opponents blatantly cheat to win or are conversely remarkably unintelligent. Lacking another person to compete with — network gaming is included in most titles in the collection, but too light on features — you'll be missing out.

Display Features

The two dozen available combat games in the anthology, a combination of gaming hall, television, and mobile releases, are precisely simulated, though I've observed a couple minor issues — mostly input lag and intermittent errors, particularly in Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are mostly shown in their original form, developer Digital Eclipse has incorporated various clever quality-of-life features and visual presentation options. For instance, players have the option to show each character's special moves during gameplay and choose to enable infinite time to perform a Fatality. Additionally available are settings for revealing concealed combatants, eliminating the need to execute some esoteric trick to access them.

Visually, the games can be experienced with numerous graphical effects and display options. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection offers very realistic options that simulate the traditional television screens of coin-op establishments or household displays, or the monochrome green display of a portable gaming device. A notably appreciated element is the choice to enable gaming hall-style borders encircling the display, with the MK game of your choice precisely and gently mirroring against the faux black plastic borders. It's remarkably visually appealing.

Additional Features

The collection includes numerous nice touches beyond the educational material and simulated classic games, featuring an audio component that enables players to reexperience the tunes of various fighting releases excluding the sounds of combatants violently defeating each other. Also present are combatant descriptions that contain backgrounds and numerous narrative components shown through arcade games' attract mode screens and endings.

Historical Preservation

Among the most significant features for hardcore Mortal Kombat fans is the ability to access a example of historically missing material in the format of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This specific release, a somewhat revised iteration of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an early attempt by Midway at head-to-head network battles in coin-op establishments. The Wavenet Edition of the game is practically indistinguishable to UMK3, but featured the capability to challenge online opponents and featured various slight bug fixes and balance. But the Wavenet update never gained traction, in part