Mortal Kombat's Legacy Kollection: An Almost Perfect Triumph for the Combat Series Franchise

The Mortal Kombat series continues to hold its share of secrets and the ability to amaze, well past its 30th anniversary after its first appearance in gaming halls. A new collection spanning the series' initial period, featuring four original arcade titles, multiple console adaptations, and derivative games, goes beyond simply a faithfully reproduced series of classics and not-so-classics — it additionally serves as a rich documentary about the making of the iconic franchise.

Even as a lifelong devotee of the franchise who has closely monitored its development and progression, there was numerous fresh aspects for me to discover and admire about the series.

What Defines the Legacy Collection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like other vintage game anthologies from the creators at Digital Eclipse, portion educational film, portion interactive museum. The collection includes 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. This compilation also features the series' ventures at spinoffs, like action-oriented titles Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — some of the brand's least successful installments.

The Legacy Kollection thus isn't a highlight reel anthology, but an exploration into the series' formative period, when the creators at Midway and brand founders the visionary developers were determining how to develop a battle series, digitized from footage of actual people, on the fly. Viewing the historical footage — that features historical videos, recent conversations, and scans of old flyers, graphic novels, and including internal communications — it's astonishing to observe how Mortal Kombat went from modest origins to a worldwide phenomenon. It's frankly astounding to see a group of pioneering developers, working with minimal planning or guidance, focus their cultural enthusiasms into creating a legendary video game series.

Documentary Portion

The historical documentation of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection documents the ascent of the fighting series and the developers' professional journeys at the now-defunct Midway. It then goes on to show how those same creators addressed how to routinely one-up themselves, experiencing considerable pressure to repeat their triumphs. It represents an intriguing historical record composed of analog films and traditional photos and hand-drawn illustrations, which demonstrate the hands-on approach of Mortal Kombat's development and how personal recommendations 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 includes titles, illustrated stories, cinematic adaptations and including the humorous real-world tour. The collection additionally features some unreleased actions and game character images among its cutting-room-floor content.

Interactive Gaming

Distributed throughout the five-part documentary's timeline are prompts to play the original releases. During specific moments, audience members can jump into a Mortal Kombat title or one of its home console ports to revisit its gameplay and artistic style, emulated nearly perfectly on contemporary systems.

I dedicated most of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, particularly 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 aforementioned game's AI-controlled opponents is a demonstration of how basic and unbalanced the coding existed in the series' initial installments. AI-managed characters clearly employ dishonest tactics or are alternatively incredibly stupid. Lacking someone to play against — online play is available in numerous anthology releases, but somewhat limited in options — the experience will be incomplete.

Visual Options

The two dozen available combat games in the collection, a combination of arcade, console, and handheld games, are faithfully recreated, though I have noticed a few small quirks — mainly control latency and sporadic glitches, particularly in Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are largely presented as-is, the creators has added several intelligent user experience improvements and visual presentation options. For example, players have the option to reveal combatant-unique actions on the display and select to activate infinite time to execute finishing moves. Additionally available are settings for unlocking secret characters, without having to perform some esoteric trick to obtain them.

Graphically, the titles can be played with a variety of filters and visual treatments. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection provides highly authentic options that simulate the cathode-ray tube displays of coin-op establishments or household displays, or the greenscale screen of a Game Boy. An especially welcome feature is the choice to enable arcade-like bezels framing the gameplay, with the MK game of your choice precisely and gently mirroring against the simulated dark plastic edges. It's quite aesthetically pleasing.

Additional Features

The collection includes numerous nice touches beyond the historical footage and recreated vintage titles, containing a soundtrack mode that lets you revisit the tunes of various Mortal Kombat games absent the noise of combatants violently defeating each other. There are also character profiles that include bios and numerous narrative components presented by arcade games' attract mode screens and conclusions.

Archival Discovery

Among the most significant features for dedicated series enthusiasts is the opportunity to play a piece of "lost media" in the guise of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This version of the game, a moderately improved edition of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an pioneering effort from the developer at direct online competitive gaming in arcades. The online-enabled release of the game is virtually identical to UMK3, but provided the ability to compete against internet adversaries and contained several small error corrections and adjustments. Yet this online edition failed to achieve popularity, in part