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Mortal Kombat continues to hold its share of secrets and the ability to amaze, more than 30 years after its first appearance in coin-op establishments. A new collection covering the franchise's earliest days, featuring four arcade games, various home ports, and spinoffs, goes beyond only a accurately simulated set of legendary games and not-so-classics — it's also a comprehensive historical account about the development of the legendary series.

Even as a lifelong Mortal Kombat fan who has carefully followed its creation and evolution, there was plenty new for me to learn and appreciate about the series.

What Makes the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like other vintage game anthologies from developer Digital Eclipse, part historical documentation, section playable historical record. The collection includes simulated releases of the pioneering arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, along with home system and portable adaptations of some of those games. This compilation also features the series' ventures at spinoffs, like action games Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — among the series' worst entries.

The Legacy Kollection consequently doesn't represent a highlight reel anthology, but an exploration into Mortal Kombat's early days, when developer Midway and franchise originators the visionary developers were determining how to develop a battle series, created from video recordings of actual people, as they went along. Observing the archival material — that features archival footage, new interviews, and reproductions of classic advertisements, illustrated stories, and even company memos — it's astonishing to observe how the series transformed from humble beginnings to a international craze. It's genuinely amazing to watch a handful of young game developers, operating with virtually no plan or oversight, direct their entertainment passions into creating a legendary video game series.

Educational Component

The historical documentation of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection charts the rise of the fighting series and the developers' professional journeys at the no-longer-operating Midway. It subsequently demonstrates how those same creators contended with how to regularly outdo their previous work, experiencing considerable stress to duplicate their achievements. It represents an intriguing historical record constructed using analog films and film-based pictures and pencil sketches, which demonstrate the hands-on approach of the series' creation process and how word of mouth helped disseminate its secrets and secrets of MK in its arcade heyday. Told in bite-sized chunks, it's an eminently watchable collection of mini-documentaries that spans games, comics, films and including the humorous real-world tour. It also includes some unused moves and character sprites among its archived development assets.

Interactive Gaming

Interspersed along the five-segment historical film's chronology are opportunities to engage with the actual titles. During specific moments, viewers can hop into a game of Mortal Kombat or a console adaptation to rediscover its combat system and visual presentation, recreated with impressive accuracy on modern hardware.

I allocated the majority of my time experiencing the original arcade titles, particularly Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Several releases here stand the test of time, particularly during local multiplayer matches. However, facing the artificial intelligence fighters in these releases is a testament to how primitive and unjust the programming was in the series' initial installments. Computer-directed fighters blatantly cheat to win or are otherwise dumb as rocks. If you don't have another person to compete with — internet multiplayer exists in numerous anthology releases, but rather basic in functionality — you'll be missing out.

Display Features

The two dozen available combat games in the anthology, a mix of coin-op, home system, and portable titles, are accurately emulated, though I detected a couple minor issues — mainly control latency and sporadic glitches, particularly in Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are primarily displayed authentically, the development team has included some smart user experience improvements and graphical adjustment settings. For example, you can choose to show each character's special moves during gameplay and choose to enable unlimited duration to execute finishing moves. There are also options for accessing hidden fighters, eliminating the need to execute complicated methods to obtain them.

Visually, the games can be enjoyed with multiple visual enhancements and presentation styles. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection offers very realistic filters that mimic the cathode-ray tube displays of gaming halls or household displays, or the monochrome green display of a portable gaming device. A particularly nice touch is the option to have coin-op-inspired frames framing the gameplay, with your selected Mortal Kombat title precisely and gently mirroring against the faux black plastic borders. It's very artistically charming.

Bonus Elements

There are plenty of welcome features besides the historical footage and recreated vintage titles, including a music player that lets you revisit the tunes of various combat titles absent the noise of combatants violently defeating each other. Additionally included are character profiles that feature histories and numerous narrative components shown through arcade games' attract mode screens and endings.

Historical Preservation

Among the most significant features for hardcore Mortal Kombat fans is the chance to experience a piece of "lost media" in the guise of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This particular edition, a slightly updated version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an initial venture by the company at one-on-one internet-based play in arcades. The online-enabled release of the game is practically indistinguishable to UMK3, but featured the capability to compete against internet adversaries and featured various slight error corrections and adjustments. But the Wavenet update failed to achieve popularity, in part