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Mortal Kombat continues to hold its share of secrets and the ability to amaze, well past its 30th anniversary after its first appearance in coin-op establishments. The recent anthology covering the franchise's earliest days, featuring four original arcade titles, various home ports, and spinoffs, goes beyond just a well-emulated series of classics including less celebrated releases — it additionally serves as a comprehensive historical account about the making of the renowned brand.

Being a long-time devotee of the franchise who has paid close attention its development and progression, there was much to discover for me to understand and value about the series.

What Defines the Historical Compilation

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection comparable to previous classic compilations from the development team Digital Eclipse, portion educational film, part playable archive. The anthology contains emulated versions of the first arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, plus console and handheld ports of some of those games. The collection even includes the brand's experiments at derivative games, like action games Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — some of the brand's worst entries.

The Legacy Kollection consequently doesn't represent a “best of” collection, but a study of Mortal Kombat's early days, when the creators at Midway and series co-creators Ed Boon and John Tobias were discovering methods to develop a battle series, created from video recordings of live performers, on the fly. Watching the documentary — which includes vintage recordings, recent conversations, and reproductions of classic advertisements, graphic novels, and even company memos — it's astonishing to observe how Mortal Kombat went from simple starts to a worldwide phenomenon. It's frankly astounding to watch a handful of pioneering developers, operating with virtually no plan or guidance, direct their entertainment passions into birthing an iconic game franchise.

Documentary Portion

The historical documentation of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection charts the rise of the combat franchise and the developers' professional journeys at the no-longer-operating Midway. It subsequently demonstrates how these identical developers reckoned with how to routinely one-up themselves, facing no small amount of pressure to repeat their achievements. It represents an intriguing historical record composed of VHS tapes and analog photographs and hand-drawn illustrations, which demonstrate the hands-on approach of the franchise's production method and how word of mouth helped spread its rumors and secrets of MK in its arcade heyday. Told in bite-sized chunks, it's thoroughly enjoyable set of brief historical films that spans games, comics, films 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 opportunities to engage with the original releases. At various points, viewers can hop into a Mortal Kombat title or one of its home console ports to reexperience its mechanics and artistic style, emulated nearly perfectly on modern hardware.

I spent the bulk of my time playing the arcade classics, especially Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Many of the games here remain enjoyable, particularly during local multiplayer matches. Yet competing with the computer-controlled adversaries in these titles is a testament to how primitive and unjust the coding existed in the series' initial installments. Computer-directed fighters clearly employ dishonest tactics or are conversely remarkably unintelligent. Lacking someone to play against — internet multiplayer exists in numerous anthology releases, but rather basic in functionality — you'll miss the full enjoyment.

Technical Presentation

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the compilation, a combination of coin-op, home system, and portable titles, are faithfully recreated, though I detected a few small quirks — mostly input lag and sporadic glitches, notably within Mortal Kombat 4. And while the games are mostly shown in their original form, the creators has added several intelligent user experience improvements and display customization choices. As an illustration, you can choose to reveal combatant-unique actions during gameplay and choose to enable infinite time to perform a Fatality. Also included are choices for accessing hidden fighters, without having to perform some esoteric trick to unlock them.

Visually, the games can be played with a variety of graphical effects and display options. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection includes remarkably accurate filters that mimic the cathode-ray tube displays of arcades or household displays, or the greenscale screen of a portable gaming device. A notably appreciated element is the setting to activate gaming hall-style borders framing the gameplay, with the specific combat game you're playing accurately and softly reflecting against the faux black plastic borders. It's quite aesthetically pleasing.

Bonus Elements

Players will discover multiple appreciated elements beyond the educational material and simulated classic games, containing a soundtrack mode that enables players to reexperience the tunes of various Mortal Kombat games absent the noise of two kombatants viciously slaughtering each other. Also present are character profiles that contain backgrounds and the various bits of lore displayed via the demo sequences of coin-op titles and final sequences.

Archival Discovery

One of the biggest highlights for committed franchise followers is the chance to experience a segment of previously unavailable content in the guise of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This particular edition, a somewhat revised iteration of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an pioneering effort from the developer at direct online competitive gaming in coin-op establishments. The online-enabled release of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but provided the ability to challenge online opponents and featured various slight bug fixes and balance. But the Wavenet update didn't find widespread adoption, in part