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Mortal Kombat retains many hidden mysteries and the power to astonish, more than 30 years after its first appearance in arcades. A new collection covering the franchise's earliest days, which includes four original arcade titles, multiple console adaptations, and spinoffs, goes beyond just a well-emulated series of classics including less celebrated releases — it functions as a comprehensive historical account about the creation of the legendary series.

As a dedicated devotee of the franchise who has closely monitored its origins and transformation, there was numerous fresh aspects for me to learn and appreciate about the series.

What Makes the Historical Compilation

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection comparable to previous classic compilations from developer Digital Eclipse, portion educational film, 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 certain releases. The anthology additionally contains the series' ventures at derivative games, like action games Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — two of the franchise's least successful installments.

The Legacy Kollection is therefore not a highlight reel anthology, but a study of Mortal Kombat's early days, when the development team Midway and brand founders the visionary developers were discovering methods to develop a battle series, produced using film material of real actors, through experimentation. Viewing the historical footage — which includes historical videos, recent conversations, and scans of old flyers, comics, and including internal communications — it's incredible to witness how the series transformed from simple starts to a worldwide phenomenon. It's frankly astounding to see a group of pioneering developers, working with minimal planning or guidance, channel their pop-culture interests into creating a legendary video game series.

Historical Section

The educational segment of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection traces the growth of Mortal Kombat and the developers' professional journeys at the currently closed Midway. It then goes on to show how those same creators contended with how to routinely one-up themselves, encountering significant demand to replicate their triumphs. It serves as a compelling period piece composed of video recordings and film-based pictures and manual drawings, which reveal the self-made character of the series' creation process and how word of mouth helped circulate its mysteries and secrets of MK in its arcade heyday. Delivered in easily digestible portions, it's thoroughly enjoyable collection of mini-documentaries that spans games, comics, films and even the comical physical events. The collection additionally features some unreleased actions and character sprites among its previously unreleased material.

Playable Component

Distributed throughout the five-segment historical film's chronology are prompts to play the actual titles. During specific moments, viewers can hop into a game of Mortal Kombat or a console adaptation to rediscover its combat system and artistic style, emulated nearly perfectly on current technology.

I spent the bulk of my time playing the arcade classics, specifically Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Numerous titles here hold up, particularly during direct competitive sessions. But playing against the artificial intelligence fighters in these releases is a reminder of how crude and unbalanced the development approached in the franchise's pioneering releases. Computer-directed fighters clearly employ dishonest tactics or are conversely remarkably unintelligent. Without having someone to play against — internet multiplayer exists in most titles in the collection, but rather basic in functionality — the experience will be incomplete.

Visual Options

The two dozen available combat games in the anthology, a blend of coin-op, home system, and portable titles, are faithfully recreated, though I detected a few small quirks — mainly control latency and intermittent errors, especially with Mortal Kombat 4. Although the titles are largely presented as-is, the development team has added several intelligent user experience improvements and graphical adjustment settings. As an illustration, users can elect to reveal combatant-unique actions on the display and select to activate unlimited duration to complete lethal techniques. There are also options for accessing hidden fighters, without having to perform obscure techniques to access them.

Visually, the games can be experienced with numerous filters and visual treatments. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection provides highly authentic filters that mimic the traditional television screens of coin-op establishments or home televisions, or the monochrome green display of a Game Boy. A notably appreciated element is the setting to activate coin-op-inspired frames surrounding the screen, with the MK game of your choice accurately and softly reflecting against the faux black plastic borders. It's quite aesthetically pleasing.

Bonus Elements

There are plenty of nice touches beyond the historical footage and recreated vintage titles, featuring an audio component that enables players to reexperience the music from multiple Mortal Kombat games without the din of fighters brutally eliminating opponents. There are also fighter biographies that include bios and the various bits of lore shown through arcade games' attract mode screens and final sequences.

Archival Discovery

A particularly notable inclusion for committed franchise followers is the ability to access a piece of "lost media" in the guise of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This particular edition, a slightly updated version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an early attempt by Midway at direct online competitive gaming in arcades. The online-enabled release of the game is practically indistinguishable to UMK3, but included the option to compete against internet adversaries and featured various slight glitch repairs and refinements. Yet this online edition failed to achieve popularity, in part