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The Mortal Kombat series retains numerous undisclosed elements and the power to astonish, over three decades after its original launch in coin-op establishments. This latest compilation spanning the franchise's earliest days, featuring four arcade games, various home ports, and related titles, goes beyond just a well-emulated series of classics along with lesser-known entries — it additionally serves as a rich documentary about the making of the legendary series.

Even as a lifelong Mortal Kombat fan who has closely monitored its origins and transformation, there was plenty new for me to discover and admire about the series.

What Constitutes the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection similar to other vintage game anthologies from the development team Digital Eclipse, portion educational film, part playable archive. The collection includes 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 collection even includes the series' ventures at spinoffs, like action-oriented titles 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 greatest hits compilation, but an examination of the series' formative period, when developer Midway and brand founders Ed Boon and John Tobias were determining how to develop a battle series, created from video recordings of actual people, as they went along. Observing the archival material — which includes historical videos, contemporary discussions, and reproductions of classic advertisements, illustrated stories, and including internal communications — it's remarkable to see how Mortal Kombat went from simple starts to a global sensation. It's frankly astounding to observe several pioneering developers, developing without clear direction or supervision, channel their pop-culture interests into creating a legendary video game series.

Documentary Portion

The educational segment of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection charts the rise of the combat franchise and the developers' professional journeys at the now-defunct Midway. It further illustrates how those same creators reckoned with how to consistently surpass their achievements, experiencing considerable demand to replicate their triumphs. It's a fascinating time capsule composed of analog films and film-based pictures and manual drawings, which showcase the DIY nature of the franchise's production method and how word of mouth helped circulate its mysteries and secrets of MK in its golden era in coin-op establishments. Presented in manageable segments, it's an eminently watchable collection of mini-documentaries that includes titles, illustrated stories, cinematic adaptations and even the silly live-action tour. The compilation also contains some never-implemented techniques and digital fighter representations among its previously unreleased material.

Playable Component

Distributed throughout the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are opportunities to engage with the original releases. At certain intervals, viewers can hop into a game of Mortal Kombat or a console adaptation to reexperience its mechanics and artistic style, emulated nearly perfectly on current technology.

I allocated the majority of my time playing the arcade classics, particularly Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Several releases here remain enjoyable, notably with local multiplayer matches. Yet competing with the artificial intelligence fighters in these releases is a reminder of how crude and unfair the coding existed in the series' initial installments. AI-managed characters clearly employ dishonest tactics or are otherwise dumb as rocks. Lacking another person to compete with — network gaming is included in numerous anthology releases, but somewhat limited in options — you'll be missing out.

Technical Presentation

The 23 playable Mortal Kombat games in the compilation, a combination of arcade, console, and handheld games, are faithfully recreated, though I detected a few small quirks — primarily delayed responses and intermittent errors, notably within Mortal Kombat 4. Although the titles are largely presented as-is, the development team has added several intelligent convenience enhancements and display customization choices. For example, you can choose to display fighter-specific techniques during gameplay and select to activate endless periods to perform a Fatality. Additionally available are settings for accessing hidden fighters, removing the requirement to complete obscure techniques to obtain them.

Artistically, the releases can be enjoyed with multiple filters and visual treatments. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection offers very realistic filters that mimic the traditional television screens of gaming halls or domestic TVs, or the greenscale screen of a Game Boy. An especially welcome feature is the choice to enable arcade-like bezels framing the gameplay, with the MK game of your choice precisely and gently mirroring against the faux black plastic borders. It's remarkably visually appealing.

Bonus Elements

There are plenty of nice touches beyond the historical footage and recreated vintage titles, including a music player that enables players to reexperience the music from multiple combat titles without the din of fighters brutally eliminating opponents. Additionally included are fighter biographies that include bios and numerous narrative components shown through the demo sequences of coin-op titles and endings.

Archival Discovery

A particularly notable inclusion for hardcore Mortal Kombat fans is the ability to access a piece of "lost media" in the guise of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This version of the game, a slightly updated version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an early attempt by Midway at direct online competitive gaming in gaming halls. The Wavenet Edition of the game is practically indistinguishable to UMK3, but featured the capability to challenge online opponents and contained several small bug fixes and balance. But the Wavenet update never gained traction, in part