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The Mortal Kombat series continues to hold many hidden mysteries and the ability to amaze, more than 30 years after its first appearance in gaming halls. A new collection spanning the franchise's earliest days, featuring a quartet of arcade releases, various home ports, and derivative games, goes beyond just a well-emulated collection of iconic titles along with lesser-known entries — it's also a rich documentary about the making of the legendary series.

Even as a lifelong enthusiast of the series who has paid close attention its origins and transformation, there was much to discover for me to understand and value about the series.

What Makes the Historical Compilation

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like other retro collections from the development team Digital Eclipse, part historical documentation, portion interactive museum. This compilation features emulated versions of the first arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, plus console and handheld ports of certain releases. The collection even includes the franchise's attempts 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 consequently doesn't represent a “best of” collection, but an examination of Mortal Kombat's early days, when the creators at Midway and series co-creators the visionary developers were determining how to make a fighting game, created from video recordings of real actors, as they went along. Viewing the historical footage — that features archival footage, contemporary discussions, and scans of old flyers, graphic novels, and including internal communications — it's incredible to witness how Mortal Kombat went from modest origins to a global sensation. It's truly remarkable to observe several early video game creators, working with minimal planning or guidance, channel their pop-culture interests into establishing an enduring gaming brand.

Documentary Portion

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection traces the growth of Mortal Kombat and its creators' careers at the now-defunct Midway. It further illustrates how those same creators addressed how to consistently surpass their achievements, encountering significant pressure to repeat their triumphs. It's a fascinating time capsule constructed using VHS tapes and film-based pictures and manual drawings, which showcase the DIY nature of Mortal Kombat's development and how oral tradition helped disseminate its secrets and undisclosed elements of the series in its golden era in coin-op establishments. Delivered in easily digestible portions, it's thoroughly enjoyable series of documentary shorts that includes titles, illustrated stories, cinematic adaptations and even the silly live-action tour. It also includes some never-implemented techniques and game character images among its previously unreleased material.

Interactive Gaming

Placed within the five-segment historical film's chronology are prompts to play the games themselves. At various points, users can directly access a game of Mortal Kombat or a console adaptation to revisit its gameplay and visual presentation, recreated with impressive accuracy on contemporary systems.

I allocated the majority of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, especially Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Numerous titles here hold up, notably with one-on-one local play. However, facing the computer-controlled adversaries in these titles is a reminder of how crude and unfair the development approached in the series' initial installments. AI-managed characters blatantly cheat to win or are otherwise dumb as rocks. If you don't have another person to compete with — network gaming is included in the majority of included games, but rather basic in functionality — the experience will be incomplete.

Display Features

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the compilation, a blend of gaming hall, television, and mobile releases, are precisely simulated, though I have noticed a handful slight anomalies — primarily delayed responses and intermittent errors, especially with Mortal Kombat 4. And while the games are largely presented as-is, the development team has included some smart quality-of-life features and visual presentation options. As an illustration, players have the option to reveal combatant-unique actions during gameplay and opt to have unlimited duration to complete lethal techniques. There are also options for unlocking secret characters, removing the requirement to complete obscure techniques to unlock them.

Graphically, the titles can be enjoyed with multiple graphical effects and display options. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection provides highly authentic options that simulate the cathode-ray tube displays of arcades or home televisions, or the greenscale screen of a Nintendo handheld. A notably appreciated element is the setting to activate coin-op-inspired frames framing the gameplay, with the MK game of your choice accurately and softly reflecting against the simulated dark plastic edges. It's very artistically charming.

Extra Content

There are plenty of appreciated elements beyond the documentary and emulated arcade classics, containing a soundtrack mode that enables players to reexperience the music from multiple Mortal Kombat games without the din of combatants violently defeating each other. There are also combatant descriptions that feature histories and multiple story elements presented by arcade games' attract mode screens and conclusions.

Archival Discovery

Among the most significant features for hardcore Mortal Kombat fans is the ability to access a piece of "lost media" in the format of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This particular edition, a moderately improved edition of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an early attempt by Midway at head-to-head network battles in gaming halls. The Wavenet Edition of the game is virtually identical to UMK3, but provided the ability to compete against internet adversaries and included some minor glitch repairs and refinements. Yet this online edition didn't find widespread adoption, in part