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This iconic fighting game still possesses its share of secrets and the ability to amaze, more than 30 years after its original launch in arcades. The recent anthology spanning the brand's formative years, featuring a quartet of arcade releases, various home ports, and derivative games, goes beyond simply a faithfully reproduced collection of iconic titles including less celebrated releases — it's also a comprehensive historical account about the making of the iconic franchise.

Being a long-time Mortal Kombat fan who has paid close attention its creation and evolution, there was plenty new for me to understand and value about the series.

What Makes the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection comparable to other vintage game anthologies from the creators at Digital Eclipse, part historical documentation, portion interactive museum. This compilation features digitally recreated editions 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 series' ventures at spin-off titles, like action games Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — some of the brand's least successful installments.

The Legacy Kollection consequently doesn't represent a highlight reel anthology, but an examination of Mortal Kombat's early days, when the creators at Midway and franchise originators the visionary developers were figuring out how to make a fighting game, created from video recordings of real actors, on the fly. Watching the documentary — which includes archival footage, contemporary discussions, and scans of old flyers, comics, and including internal communications — it's astonishing to observe how Mortal Kombat went from humble beginnings to a international craze. It's frankly astounding to watch a handful of young game developers, working with minimal planning or supervision, channel their pop-culture interests into birthing an iconic game franchise.

Educational Component

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection documents the ascent of the combat franchise and the developers' professional journeys at the no-longer-operating Midway. It then goes on to show how the very same individuals reckoned with how to routinely one-up themselves, experiencing considerable pressure to repeat their achievements. It serves as a compelling period piece composed of VHS tapes and analog photographs and hand-drawn illustrations, which showcase the DIY nature of the franchise's production method and how word of mouth helped disseminate its secrets and undisclosed elements of the series in its peak period in gaming halls. Delivered in easily digestible portions, it's an eminently watchable series of documentary shorts that spans games, comics, films and even the comical physical events. It also includes some unreleased actions and game character images among its previously unreleased material.

Interactive Gaming

Placed within the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are opportunities to engage with the games themselves. At certain intervals, audience members can jump into a game of Mortal Kombat or one of its home console ports to reexperience its mechanics and graphics, simulated with remarkable precision on contemporary systems.

I spent the bulk of my time experiencing the original arcade titles, specifically Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Many of the games here hold up, particularly during local multiplayer matches. Yet competing with the aforementioned game's AI-controlled opponents is a reminder of how crude and unbalanced the programming was in early Mortal Kombat games. CPU-controlled opponents blatantly cheat to win or are otherwise dumb as rocks. Lacking someone to play against — network gaming is included in most titles in the collection, but too light on features — 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 precisely simulated, though I detected a couple minor issues — mainly control latency and intermittent errors, notably within Mortal Kombat 4. Although the titles are largely presented as-is, developer Digital Eclipse has included some smart quality-of-life features and visual presentation options. For example, players have the option to reveal combatant-unique actions on the display and opt to have unlimited duration to perform a Fatality. There are also options for unlocking secret characters, eliminating the need to execute some esoteric trick to access them.

Visually, the games can be experienced with numerous visual enhancements and presentation styles. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection offers very realistic effects that reproduce the CRT monitors of arcades or domestic TVs, or the limited color monitor of a Nintendo handheld. An especially welcome feature is the option to have gaming hall-style borders framing the gameplay, with your selected Mortal Kombat title faithfully and subtly duplicating against the faux black plastic borders. It's remarkably visually appealing.

Additional Features

The collection includes numerous appreciated elements beyond the historical footage and recreated vintage titles, containing a soundtrack mode that allows users to rediscover the tunes of various Mortal Kombat games without the din of two kombatants viciously slaughtering each other. Also present are character profiles that contain backgrounds and the various bits of lore presented by the demo sequences of coin-op titles and conclusions.

Archival Discovery

One of the biggest highlights for committed franchise followers is the opportunity to play a piece of "lost media" in the form of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This specific release, a moderately improved edition of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an initial venture by the company at head-to-head network battles in coin-op establishments. The online-enabled release of the game is practically indistinguishable to UMK3, but provided the ability to compete against internet adversaries and included some minor glitch repairs and refinements. Yet this online edition never gained traction, in part