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The Mortal Kombat series retains many hidden mysteries and the power to astonish, more than 30 years after its first appearance in arcades. The recent anthology including the franchise's earliest days, comprising four original arcade titles, multiple console adaptations, and derivative games, transcends simply a faithfully reproduced collection of iconic titles and not-so-classics — it's also a detailed chronicle about the development of the legendary series.

Even as a lifelong enthusiast of the series who has carefully followed its creation and evolution, there was numerous fresh aspects for me to understand and value about the series.

What Defines the Historical Compilation

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like other retro collections from the development team Digital Eclipse, part documentary, 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 some of those games. The collection even includes the series' ventures at derivative games, like action-oriented titles Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — two of the franchise's most criticized releases.

The Legacy Kollection is therefore not a “best of” collection, but a study of Mortal Kombat's early days, when the development team Midway and brand founders Ed Boon and John Tobias were figuring out how to develop a battle series, digitized from footage of live performers, on the fly. Observing the archival material — which includes historical videos, recent conversations, and reproductions of classic advertisements, comics, and including internal communications — it's remarkable to see how the franchise evolved from simple starts to a international craze. It's genuinely amazing to observe several young game developers, working with minimal planning or guidance, focus their cultural enthusiasms into birthing an iconic game franchise.

Historical Section

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection traces the growth of Mortal Kombat and its creators' careers at the now-defunct Midway. It then goes on to show how those same creators contended with how to regularly outdo their previous work, encountering significant demand to replicate their achievements. It serves as a compelling period piece constructed using VHS tapes and film-based pictures and hand-drawn illustrations, which reveal the self-made character of Mortal Kombat's development and how word of mouth helped disseminate its secrets and secrets of MK in its arcade heyday. Presented in manageable segments, it's highly engaging series of documentary shorts that spans games, comics, films and even the comical physical events. The collection additionally features some unused moves and digital fighter representations among its cutting-room-floor content.

Interactive Gaming

Placed within the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are invitations to experience the games themselves. At certain intervals, audience members can jump into a combat game session or a home system version to reexperience its mechanics and visual presentation, simulated with remarkable precision on current technology.

I allocated the majority of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, specifically Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Numerous titles here hold up, particularly during one-on-one local play. But playing against the aforementioned game's AI-controlled opponents is a demonstration of how basic and unbalanced the development approached in the series' initial installments. AI-managed characters blatantly cheat to win or are otherwise dumb as rocks. Lacking someone to play against — network gaming is included in the majority of included games, but too light on features — you'll be missing out.

Technical Presentation

The two dozen available combat games in the collection, a combination of gaming hall, television, and mobile releases, are faithfully recreated, though I detected a few small quirks — mainly control latency and sporadic glitches, particularly in Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are mostly shown in their original form, the creators has incorporated various clever quality-of-life features and display customization choices. For instance, players have the option to display fighter-specific techniques on the display and select to activate unlimited duration to execute finishing moves. There are also options for revealing concealed combatants, without having to perform some esoteric trick to access them.

Artistically, the releases can be experienced with numerous graphical effects and display options. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection includes remarkably accurate effects that reproduce the traditional television screens of gaming halls or household displays, or the greenscale screen of a portable gaming device. A particularly nice touch is the setting to activate gaming hall-style borders framing the gameplay, with the MK game of your choice accurately and softly reflecting against the artificial ebony plastic frames. It's very artistically charming.

Bonus Elements

There are plenty of welcome features besides the historical footage and recreated vintage titles, featuring an audio component that lets you revisit the soundtracks of different Mortal Kombat games absent the noise of two kombatants viciously slaughtering each other. Additionally included are character profiles that feature histories and multiple story elements presented by the demo sequences of coin-op titles and endings.

Lost Media Recovery

A particularly notable inclusion for hardcore Mortal Kombat fans is the opportunity to play a example of historically missing material in the format of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This particular edition, a somewhat revised iteration of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an initial venture by the company at one-on-one internet-based play in arcades. The Wavenet Edition of the game is practically indistinguishable to UMK3, but provided the ability to compete against internet adversaries and contained several small bug fixes and balance. But the Wavenet update never gained traction, in part