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The Mortal Kombat series retains numerous undisclosed elements and the ability to amaze, more than 30 years after its first appearance in arcades. This latest compilation spanning the franchise's earliest days, comprising a quartet of arcade releases, multiple console adaptations, and derivative games, transcends just a well-emulated collection of iconic titles along with lesser-known entries — it's also a detailed chronicle about the making of the legendary series.

Even as a lifelong Mortal Kombat fan who has paid close attention its origins and transformation, there was numerous fresh aspects for me to discover and admire about the series.

What Constitutes the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like other retro collections from developer Digital Eclipse, part documentary, part playable archive. The anthology contains digitally recreated editions of the pioneering arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, including television and mobile versions of several of these titles. This compilation also features the franchise's attempts at spin-off titles, like combat-focused releases Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — two of the franchise's least successful installments.

The Legacy Kollection consequently doesn't represent a “best of” collection, but a study of the franchise's initial era, when the development team Midway and series co-creators the visionary developers were discovering methods to create a combat title, created from video recordings of real actors, as they went along. Watching the documentary — containing historical videos, new interviews, and scans of old flyers, illustrated stories, and including internal communications — it's astonishing to observe how the series transformed from modest origins to a international craze. It's genuinely amazing to observe several young game developers, operating with virtually no plan or supervision, 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 Mortal Kombat and the developers' professional journeys at the currently closed Midway. It then goes on to show how these identical developers addressed how to regularly outdo their previous work, encountering significant stress to duplicate their triumphs. It represents an intriguing historical record made from video recordings and film-based pictures and pencil sketches, which showcase the DIY nature of Mortal Kombat's development and how word of mouth helped circulate its mysteries and secrets of MK in its peak period in gaming halls. Presented in manageable segments, it's an eminently watchable series of documentary shorts that includes titles, illustrated stories, cinematic adaptations and including the humorous real-world tour. It also includes some unreleased actions and game character images among its cutting-room-floor content.

Interactive Gaming

Distributed throughout the five-segment historical film's chronology are prompts to play the original releases. During specific moments, viewers can hop into a game of Mortal Kombat or one of its home console ports to revisit its gameplay and artistic style, recreated with impressive accuracy on modern hardware.

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. Many of the games here remain enjoyable, especially in one-on-one local play. But playing against the aforementioned game's AI-controlled opponents is a testament to how primitive and unbalanced the coding existed in early Mortal Kombat games. AI-managed characters clearly employ dishonest tactics or are alternatively incredibly stupid. Lacking a human opponent — network gaming is included in numerous anthology releases, but somewhat limited in options — the experience will be incomplete.

Display Features

The two dozen available combat games in the anthology, a mix of arcade, console, and handheld games, are precisely simulated, though I have noticed a couple minor issues — primarily delayed responses and intermittent errors, particularly in Mortal Kombat 4. And while the games are largely presented as-is, the creators has incorporated various clever user experience improvements and display customization choices. For instance, you can choose to show each character's special moves on the display and select to activate endless periods to perform a Fatality. Also included are choices for accessing hidden fighters, eliminating the need to execute some esoteric trick to access them.

Visually, the games can be enjoyed with multiple visual enhancements and presentation styles. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection provides highly authentic options that simulate the CRT monitors of arcades or domestic TVs, or the limited color monitor of a Game Boy. An especially welcome feature is the choice to enable arcade-like bezels surrounding the screen, with the MK game of your choice faithfully and subtly duplicating against the faux black plastic borders. It's quite aesthetically pleasing.

Bonus Elements

There are plenty of appreciated elements beyond the documentary and emulated arcade classics, featuring an audio component that allows users to rediscover the tunes of various fighting releases excluding the sounds of fighters brutally eliminating opponents. Additionally included are fighter biographies that include bios and the various bits of lore presented by the idle displays of gaming hall releases and endings.

Archival Discovery

Among the most significant features for hardcore Mortal Kombat fans is the opportunity to play 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 early attempt by Midway at head-to-head network battles in arcades. This network version of the game is practically indistinguishable to UMK3, but featured the capability to challenge online opponents and contained several small glitch repairs and refinements. But the Wavenet update failed to achieve popularity, in part