Tattoo Assassins

Tattoo Assassins is a video game that consists of 0 releases

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This digitized fighting game was designed to take on the Mortal Kombat series, but it was cancelled before release. Data East worked with Bob Gale, producer and writer of the Back to the Future films, on this fatality-filled fighter.

Co-created by Bob Gale, who produced and co-wrote the Back To The Future trilogy! (there was even a Fatality involving a Delorean !!)

There was a time when Fighting games dominated the local arcades. Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Killer Instinct plus an innumerable number of clones trying to cash in on the fad dominated the arcade space. Tattoo Assassins was made to deliberately cash in on the success of these franchises but took heavy "influence" from the Mortal Kombat franchise. It attempted to mimic MK's digitized art style and over the top violence advertising over 200 fatalities (it was the first fighting game to include "NUDEalities") for better or worse.

At its heart Tattoo Assassins is a Mortal Kombat wanna be with bad graphics and horrible controls. You choose 1 of 9 playable characters and fight your way up the ranks through 3 sub-bosses leading up to a final encounter with the games villain Koldan. The story involves a dwarf in a diaper named Mullah Abba discovering the secrets to a magical ink called "the ink of Ghize" (with a name like ghize it makes you assume the ink was harvested at the local sperm bank or adult movie theater) They describe the ink as a "magical living organism" (my theory on its origins are making more sense.....ewwww) and this ink has the ability to bring life to its wearers tattoos for short periods of time. Koldan wants all the ink for himself so he can create an army of mutants and enslave mankind. So, you are tasked to defeat the evil Koldan and save the earth.

This game has a rather infamous story revolving around its inception. Apparently Joe Kaminkow (worked for DATA EAST pinball) and Bob Gale (co-creator of the back to the future trilogy) became friends after collaborating on the back to the future pinball game. Bob started sending Joe copies of his movie scripts and one of them happened to involve warriors who battled with magical tattoos. Apparently they both thought this was a great premise for a video game because production on Tattoo Assassins started shortly after.

The team was quickly patched together and were put to task to create the game in only 8 months. A difficult task for any development team but considering the majority of the Tattoo Assassins team had little to no video game experience, the game was doomed to fail from the beginning.

There were stories of the team being forced to work 12 hour days, 7 days a week, and having there meals catered in so they wouldn't need to leave work. By most accounts from team members stated they all started to resent the long work hours and stopped caring about the quality of the game and just wanted it all to end.

Only two working arcade cabinets were ever created the first was victim to a flood and was destroyed, and the last lives on in infamy at the company's headquarters.

General Information Edit

Game Name	Tattoo Assassins
Platform(s)	Arcade
Publisher(s)	Data East Corporation
Developer(s)	Data East Corporation
Genres	Add a new genre Fighting
Themes	Add a new theme Martial Arts
Original US Release	need a fuzzy date?
Original US Release	know the real date?
Aliases