One of the biggest problems in fighting games is preservation. It doesn’t matter how good the game is, or how influential it was, or whether it’s a beloved classic or a flash in the pan or anything in-between. It’s just hard to play old fighting games on modern hardware. If you want to play any Tekken earlier than 7, you’d better have an old console hooked up. SoulCalibur? I hope you have a Switch 2 and/or the delisted re-releases or physical discs. The best version of Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike? Still trapped on the Xbox 360 and PS3. And on and on and on it goes. Some have done better than others (Capcom, SNK, Arc System Works), but the reality is that a lot of the best, most important fighting games of yesteryear are lost to time or trapped on old hardware or saddled with bad ports that make them essentially unplayable at worst and deeply flawed at best. And that’s the best-case scenario. The ones that burned out or faded away? You probably can’t legally play them at all. Rest in peace, Masters of Teras Kasi fans.
That’s the situation Digital Eclipse is stepping into with Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection, a compilation of Mortal Kombat’s glory days from the early days. If Digital Eclipse seems like the right studio for this type of thing, it’s probably because they have a lot of history doing it, having made Tetris Forever, Atari 50: The Anniversary Collection, and, my personal favorite, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection, among many, many others. They know what they’re doing here; the only question will be execution.
The most important things, of course, are the games themselves. The classics are all here: Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat II, Mortal Kombat 3, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, Mortal Kombat 4. But it’s not just the arcade games. The console and handheld versions are here, too. If you prefer the sweaty SNES release of the original Mortal Kombat, it’s there for you. If you’re more into the gory Genesis game, that’s here, too. Me, I’m an arcade purist, but it’s nice that there are options here for people who aren’t, or who’d just like to see the different versions of each one.
But we’re not limited to the klassic (sorry) versions that everybody and their mama played. The weird stuff is here, too. That means the Game Boy Advance version of Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance is included, plus things like the 32X version of Mortal Kombat II and the Game Boy and Game Gear versions of the original Mortal Kombat. I didn’t even know they made a Game Boy version of the original Mortal Kombat, but it’s here for you if you want it.
In addition, every game in the Legacy Kollection will support online multiplayer with rollback netcode powered by GGPO, one of the best rollback solutions in the business. This release will mark the first time most of the games in this collection have online play. That’s meant a lot of extra work for Digital Eclipse (adding online play to fighting games that don’t already have it is a notoriously difficult undertaking), but if they can get it right, it’ll be an enormous accomplishment.
Online play isn’t the only new deal in this package, though. Digital Eclipse is letting you unlock every secret with the touch of a button. That means characters, game settings, hidden developer menus, the whole enchilada. If you’d rather do things like unlock Reptile normally (seriously, go look up the process for that in the original MK just to remember how wild some of MK’s arcade secrets were), you can do that. But if you don’t want the hassle, every secret is at your fingertips.
What I’m most looking forward to, however, is Digital Eclipse’s propensity for archival work, which will appear in the Legacy Kollection. That means interviews with the likes of Ed Boon, John Tobias, Dan Forden, John Vogel, and many, many more – but also archival stuff, like footage of the actors that was scanned into the game and the Mortal Kombat prequel comic book, written and illustrated by Tobias himself, that you could send away for by mail and is, like all collectors items, now prohibitively expensive to acquire. Throw in a timeline of the series that traces each character’s history and the story of MK’s various realms, and it sounds like the Legacy Kollection will have everything an oldhead MK fan (and young guns looking to learn the series history) could want. And as someone who grew up in the arcade with those games, I’m glad that they’ll be available for everyone. I’ll see you online in UMK3.
