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

The Mortal Kombat series retains many hidden mysteries and the power to astonish, more than 30 years after its initial debut in gaming halls. The recent anthology including the brand's formative years, comprising a quartet of arcade releases, various home ports, and derivative games, is more than just a well-emulated series of classics along with lesser-known entries — it's also a detailed chronicle about the creation of the renowned brand.

Even as a lifelong Mortal Kombat fan who has closely monitored its development and progression, there was numerous fresh aspects for me to understand and value about the series.

What Makes the Legacy Collection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like previous classic compilations from the creators at Digital Eclipse, part documentary, part playable archive. This compilation features digitally recreated editions of the original arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, along with home system and portable adaptations of some of those games. The collection even includes the brand's experiments at derivative games, like action-oriented titles Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — among the series' worst entries.

The Legacy Kollection is therefore not a “best of” collection, but an exploration into the series' formative period, when the creators at Midway and franchise originators the creative duo behind the series were figuring out how to develop a battle series, created from video recordings of actual people, on the fly. Watching the documentary — containing vintage recordings, contemporary discussions, and reproductions of classic advertisements, illustrated stories, and even interoffice faxes — it's incredible to witness how the franchise evolved from humble beginnings to a international craze. It's truly remarkable to watch a handful of young game developers, developing without clear direction or guidance, focus their cultural enthusiasms into creating a legendary video game series.

Documentary Portion

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection traces the growth of the fighting series and its creators' careers at the no-longer-operating Midway. It then goes on to show how these identical developers contended with how to consistently surpass their achievements, experiencing considerable demand to replicate their achievements. It represents an intriguing historical record constructed using VHS tapes and analog photographs and pencil sketches, which reveal the self-made character of the series' creation process and how personal recommendations helped circulate its mysteries and secrets of MK in its peak period in gaming halls. Told in bite-sized chunks, it's highly engaging series of documentary shorts that spans games, comics, films and including the humorous real-world tour. The compilation also contains some unreleased actions and character sprites among its archived development assets.

Playable Component

Distributed throughout the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are opportunities to engage with the original releases. At various points, users can directly access a game of Mortal Kombat or a console adaptation to revisit its gameplay and artistic style, recreated with impressive accuracy on current technology.

I dedicated most of my time playing the arcade classics, particularly Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Numerous titles here remain enjoyable, notably with direct competitive sessions. However, facing the computer-controlled adversaries in these titles is a demonstration of how basic and unfair the programming was in early Mortal Kombat games. CPU-controlled opponents clearly employ dishonest tactics or are conversely remarkably unintelligent. Without having another person to compete with — network gaming is included in the majority of included games, but somewhat limited in options — you'll be missing out.

Visual Options

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the anthology, a blend of arcade, console, and handheld games, are faithfully recreated, though I have noticed a few small quirks — mainly control latency and the occasional bug, notably within Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are primarily displayed authentically, the development team has added several intelligent convenience enhancements and visual presentation options. For example, users can elect to reveal combatant-unique actions during gameplay and opt to have unlimited duration to execute finishing moves. Additionally available are settings for revealing concealed combatants, removing the requirement to complete obscure techniques to obtain them.

Artistically, the releases can be enjoyed with multiple graphical effects and display options. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection offers very realistic effects that reproduce the cathode-ray tube displays of arcades or household displays, or the monochrome green display of a Nintendo handheld. An especially welcome feature is the option to have coin-op-inspired frames framing the gameplay, with your selected Mortal Kombat title accurately and softly reflecting against the simulated dark plastic edges. It's very artistically charming.

Additional Features

The collection includes numerous welcome features besides the historical footage and recreated vintage titles, featuring an audio component that allows users to rediscover the soundtracks of different combat titles absent the noise of fighters brutally eliminating opponents. Additionally included are combatant descriptions that include bios and the various bits of lore presented by the demo sequences of coin-op titles and conclusions.

Archival Discovery

Among the most significant features for hardcore Mortal Kombat fans is the chance to experience a example of historically missing material 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 one-on-one internet-based play in coin-op establishments. The Wavenet Edition of the game is practically indistinguishable to UMK3, but provided the ability to challenge online opponents and contained several small error corrections and adjustments. But the Wavenet update failed to achieve popularity, in part