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The Mortal Kombat series continues to hold its share of secrets and the ability to amaze, well past its 30th anniversary after its original launch in arcades. The recent anthology spanning the series' initial period, featuring a quartet of arcade releases, various home ports, and spinoffs, is more than only a accurately simulated collection of iconic titles and not-so-classics — it's also a rich documentary about the making of the legendary series.

Even as a lifelong enthusiast of the series who has carefully followed its creation and evolution, there was plenty new for me to learn and appreciate about the series.

What Constitutes the Historical Compilation

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like other retro collections from the creators at Digital Eclipse, part historical documentation, section playable historical record. The anthology contains simulated releases of the pioneering arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, along with home system and portable adaptations of certain releases. This compilation also features the franchise's attempts at derivative games, like action-oriented titles Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — among the series' most criticized releases.

The Legacy Kollection thus isn't a greatest hits compilation, but an examination of Mortal Kombat's early days, when the creators at Midway and series co-creators Ed Boon and John Tobias 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 archival footage, recent conversations, and scans of old flyers, illustrated stories, and even company memos — it's remarkable to see how Mortal Kombat went from modest origins to a worldwide phenomenon. It's frankly astounding to observe several pioneering developers, working with minimal planning or guidance, direct their entertainment passions into establishing an enduring gaming brand.

Historical Section

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection traces the growth of the fighting series and the developers' professional journeys at the now-defunct Midway. It subsequently demonstrates how the very same individuals reckoned with how to routinely one-up themselves, experiencing considerable demand to replicate their triumphs. It's a fascinating time capsule constructed using analog films and traditional photos and pencil sketches, which reveal the self-made character of the series' creation process and how oral tradition helped disseminate its secrets and secrets of MK in its peak period in gaming halls. Delivered in easily digestible portions, it's thoroughly enjoyable series of documentary shorts that spans games, comics, films and including the humorous real-world tour. It also includes some never-implemented techniques and game character images among its archived development assets.

Interactive Experience

Distributed throughout the five-part documentary's timeline are invitations to experience the original releases. During specific moments, viewers can hop into a game of Mortal Kombat or one of its home console ports to reexperience its mechanics and graphics, emulated nearly perfectly on contemporary systems.

I dedicated most of my time playing the arcade classics, especially Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Numerous titles here hold up, notably with local multiplayer matches. But playing against the computer-controlled adversaries in these titles is a testament to how primitive and unbalanced the coding existed in early Mortal Kombat games. CPU-controlled opponents blatantly cheat to win or are conversely remarkably unintelligent. If you don't have a human opponent — online play is available in the majority of included games, but somewhat limited in options — you'll miss the full enjoyment.

Display Features

The 23 playable Mortal Kombat games in the anthology, a combination of gaming hall, television, and mobile releases, are faithfully recreated, though I detected a handful slight anomalies — primarily delayed responses and the occasional bug, notably within Mortal Kombat 4. And while the games are primarily displayed authentically, developer Digital Eclipse has included some smart user experience improvements and graphical adjustment settings. As an illustration, players have the option to show each character's special moves on-screen and choose to enable endless periods to execute finishing moves. There are also options for unlocking secret characters, without having to perform complicated methods to unlock them.

Artistically, the releases can be experienced with numerous visual enhancements and presentation styles. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection provides highly authentic effects that reproduce the CRT monitors of arcades or domestic TVs, or the greenscale screen of a Nintendo handheld. An especially welcome feature is the choice to enable gaming hall-style borders encircling the display, with your selected Mortal Kombat title accurately and softly reflecting against the artificial ebony plastic frames. It's very artistically charming.

Bonus Elements

There are plenty of nice touches beyond the historical footage and recreated vintage titles, featuring an audio component that allows users to rediscover the music from multiple fighting releases absent the noise of combatants violently defeating each other. Also present are character profiles that contain backgrounds and multiple story elements shown through arcade games' attract mode screens and endings.

Archival Discovery

One of the biggest highlights for hardcore Mortal Kombat fans is the ability to access a segment of previously unavailable content in the format of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This version of the game, a somewhat revised iteration of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an initial venture by the company at direct online competitive gaming in arcades. The online-enabled release of the game is practically indistinguishable to UMK3, but featured the capability to challenge online opponents and included some minor error corrections and adjustments. But the Wavenet update didn't find widespread adoption, in part