Mon-Fri: Gamewrecks Episode 1

We'll resume gamedev content soon, but I had an urge to branch out to break up the monotony.

For this Week's Mon-Fri recap of what I've been up to, I've got a treat for patrons alone: the script, as it stands, for the first episode of Gamewrecks: Tattoo Assassins! FEAR! 

Or more likely, feel sympathy for the poor folks that worked on this thing, whatever.

See you next week!

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The Intro

The history of fighting games is could fill volumes and is still being written, the pages full of stories not simply from the games themselves, but the community that surrounds it. Live Street Fighter filled the Mandalay Bay Event Center at EVO 2016 and brought stories of rivalry and family to viewers watching at home, both streaming and on television. Scorpion now rubs elbows with Batman in a crossover guest spot within a DC Universe videogame. Smash Brothers comes out to dominate the 2018 Nintendo E3 presentation with what was basically the world’s most dynamic presentation of revision notes to date. Head to head, character to character, execution and strategy to execution and strategy, the annals of Fightgames are multitudinous, downright legionary, and ever ongoing. And from those annals, I humbly bring you a vision of 

[PER-FEC-TION]

Insert Coin, all ye who enter here.

The Context

There was no greater heyday for the arcade than the 90s, and this is absolutely in no small part to the emergence and boom of the Fighting Game genre. Games like Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat pulled players into local hives of dim light, constant, deafening squarewave drone and shady adults of varying degrees of hinkiness, with their various gameplay intrigues, the deeper mechanical guts of Street Fighter, and the mysterious and violent elements of Mortal Kombat. On top of that, there was the competitive aspect that drew people in, and players quickly found out there was a lot of depth that could be leveraged against a live opponent, both within the mechanics of the games themselves, and the greater mental-emotional headspace of the players that makes up the meta-game of the fighting genre. This was real interest, and it made arcade operators able to make bank one quarter at a time.

I blame the fact that I used to be willing to shell out actual physical money for extra lives on why I have built up as many cosmetic items in Warframe over the years.

With interest in fighting games spiking LAMF, the race was on for developers beyond Capcom and Williams-Midway to create their own entries into this new frontier of fireballs thrown from hands and excessive, but very specific, human tolerances for physical punishment. Some were successes, and are still going, much beloved series that have grown to have their own unique feel and character. SNK, after much time spent being a fairly shameless imitator, went on to expand and add to the genre with multitude of games, much beloved by fans- King of Fighters and Samurai Showdown being the biggest among them. Sega and Namco got ambitious with their 3D tech and straight up forked the genre, resulting in a new subspecies- the 3D Fighting Game. This is significant, even if it doesn’t seem like much to people that don’t play fighting games, but suffice to say, adding or removing the element of depth from a fight? That really swaps things up a bit. Even Rare got in, producing a game that took the concept of the combo attack and really… did something with it. Really, really did something with it, so much so that even if you see more jank in original KI than actual good game, you gotta still admit, if you were like 12 and saw that shit going down on screen, yeah, you’d pay to play. I sure did.

But for every success, there were multiple failures. Some of these are games that are actually part of or related to more well known series. Art of Fighting 3 is a beautiful looking game, with a universe that has become folded into King of Fighters, that also plays like it’s fighters are immersed in melted wax. And not actually that melted, either. Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game is digital exercise in absurdism, except actually a real game, made by real people with real intent. Apparently actors had a clause in their contract that they had to do this. T. Hawk’s dude didn’t show up. I guess that’s why Akuma’s in the game, because he wasn’t in the movie.

There are also games that exist out on their own, independent of others, and frankly they’re too many to count. Some of these got arcade releases. Some of them got console ports. Some of them existed only on consoles. All were varying degrees of bad. Some were made by people with interesting ideas but without a full or good idea of how to make them work smoothly within a fighting game, or the games themselves didn’t play up to snuff. But a lot of them are just complete messes, bizarre scramble-suit bits of software that chimera-scream their own terrified self-aware existence of “I don’t know what I am except in pain.” Others are just soulless cash ins, most likely farted out by people who didn’t fully know what they were getting into, but did know they wanted some of that sweet sweet fightman money. These are games that frustrate, time waste, and offend both the senses and sensibility. Kemco’s Blood Warrior is a hideous attempt to cash in on Mortal Kombat’s excessive blood. Ditto Sammy’s Survival Arts, which also goes on to double down as being one of the most grating sounding games I’ve ever experienced. Ultra Vor-Tek was available only on the Atari Jaguar, and it only has itself to blame for that, like pretty much everything else in it. Bloodstorm exists. Here it is:

Thing is, these games got released. Burned onto disc, soldered into cartridge boards, walled up inside standup arcade cabs, people saw these games through to market, because goddammit, this was the 90s, coffee is for closers, and closers have a fighting game as part of their catalogue of series. Maybe more, depends on how good they are.

So we’re not actually going to be talking about any of these games.

We’re going to be talking about a game that didn’t make it to market.

The Background

Data East Corporation is no longer around, and there’s reason for that. The most that you can say about the good games that they made is that they’re pretty cult, but at least they get that exposure. The least you can say about their bad games is that they made Karnov, and nobody’s still sure as to why. They made Karate Champ and Burgertime, and that’s worth some degree of clout in terms of videogame history. They also made Bad Dudes vs Dragon Ninja, the game that was a meme before we called that shit that, and Trio the Punch- Never Forget Me, which is a game you could tell me was produced entirely from within the stupor of a collective and severe concussion, and I’d believe you. They were notable, is what I’m saying, but notable doesn’t necessarily come with staying power attached, and that’s why they went under in 2003 and their former chairman now heads up a company that makes medical software. So hey, there’s an actually decently pleasant footnote there.

Data East was a Japanese corporation, but it had an American division, which developed pinball, not videogames. Data East Pinball is significantly more notable a developer, for a number of reasons. First, because they innovated in their use of tech that would later become commonplace in pins- stereo sound and dot matrix displays were things DEP planted their flag on first in the world of pinball. Second, they were known, despite not being a particularly outstanding pinball developer, for their high profile licenses: Star Wars, The Simpsons, Batman, TMNT, Guns N’ Roses and Back to the Future. 

The reason for this is attributable to an individual Joe Kaminkow, who in an alternate timeline probably made a kickass college football recruiter. It was whatever ineffable moxie he wielded- Hollywood types emit spores that can cloud the mind, but some people have an immunity -that allowed him to secure some high profile gets in the world of licenses. Not to mention some interesting side venues for income- Michael Jordan had a custom pinball machine made for him by Data East, which was probably an upcoming table rebadged and rebranded for him. Same deal with Aaron Spelling, though trying to visualize what the Aaron Spelling pinball table would entail is like trying to picture something blacker than the space between galaxies.

You try it, and then the darkness you visualize grows a hostile and hungry shape, and you have to open your eyes to escape it.

Point is, Joe Kaminkow was a mover and a shaker that could allow the technically apt but outgunned from an engineering standpoint Data East Pinball to maneuver in the market. It worked too, for a while, because Data East Pinball owned a quarter of the market by its lonesome.

But pinball is pinball, and we unfortunately know how this goes: with the fate of arcades themselves, as a mode of entertainment largely seen as a thing of the past. I love pinball. But for what it is, in an entertainment market that was being rapidly evolved by the digital, and not the analogue, it’s easy to see why- even an arcade game could be produced simply as a board and installed in a standup that could accept it, and repurposing machines was common. But pins are a constructed thing, with would could be considered an early form of firmware driving a huge, heavy mechanical device that really, really loves nothing more than breaking down. Logistically, even within an arcade scene that was still thriving, pinball was struggling to be a worthwhile bottom line for Data East.

So Joe made his move, a move to an individual he met and befriended during the production of Back to the Future’s pinball table: writer Bob Gale. Together, they collaborated on what would be Kaminkow’s vision to bring his division into a new age, a dazzling new fighting game that would push the limits of what was being done in the genre, taking it to places never before seen, at quantities utterly overwhelming.

How could they fail?

In literally every imaginable way.

The Break

Making a game is an endeavor. Making a large game is a challenge, even for a seasoned team. Making a technically complex game that seems at first simple, and straightforward to pick up and play, that reveals its deeper intricacies through observation and practice? That’s not advisable for even veteran devs that haven’t worked in the genre, not unless you’ve got people with experience to guide your hand. Fighting games are a true example of this, because while nobody should walk unprepared into a specific genre when developing a new game, fighting games are highly competitive and because of that, skill levels evolve to a degree and upper ceiling that people outside the genre can’t actually conceptualize what’s going on at them, because they don’t know they even exist. This is why people like Seth Killian and Combofiend do what they do, among others: a skilled fighting game player can give eyes to your project that other team members don’t have, not only giving insight into what you’re doing, but what you should be doing.

Data East Pinball made pinball, a heavily featured analogue and mechanical experience that’s about manipulating a physically real metal ball with simple end effectors and physics to make it traverse a course and hit targets, resulting in score. Taking a team that does that, then saying “hey, make a fighting game” is a lot like taking a team that makes military firearms and asking them to design a civilian family sedan. Okay, sure, fine, they might have some good ideas, and they absolutely have the technical know-how in their field to be respected as someone that knows what it is that they’re doing. But asking such a team to do so for the first time, with the intent of then taking whatever it is they put out and then selling it as a product to entertainment business operators? That’s a car you can’t guarantee doesn’t run on gunpowder, and won’t violently explode when you try to turn the ignition.

Own the road, with a driving experience like no other. Just ignore the loud report and burning sensation in your groin. That’s the true thirty caliber experience… in an automobile.

This is what we’re looking at here. A thing that you sit in and it harms you. Not malicious or out of malfeasance, but because it’s just not something that anyone should have tried. This thing was a bad idea, a really really bad idea. They did it anyway. It’s called Tattoo Assassins. It did not see a public release. And you can probably see why. But a dead body laying in the street is a crime scene, and we’re here to do an autopsy.

Where’s my bonesaw?

The Wreck

• An Intro to Bad Fighting Games
  • If you want to find some really pure gamedev hubris on display, look no further than the people who thought they knew what a fighting game is. They didn’t, and it shows to those who are savvy to the genre. Because of course, it looks like a simple genre, so much so that actual game critics dismiss it as being something that focuses on a small element of other games, not really getting that very few games outside the genre perform the verb “fight” with such deep technicality. The fighting genre is often seen as having a particularly intimidating lexicon of terms that are basically nonsense to outsiders. What’s cancelling? What’s frame advantage? What are OTGs? What is fuzzy guard? What games have footsies, and what even is footsies? These are all actual things that if you weren’t into matters, you’d think I was making up to mess with you. I’m not, which should give you an idea right away that there’s more to these things than what first meets the eye. Your assumption is understandable, because the basic conceit of “two people beat hell from one another until one of them can’t get up any more” is just right there, it looks simple. It isn’t, and if you don’t know this, yet still think you want to make a fighting game,  then your fighting game is going to look weak and janky by comparison to people who actually do know what they’re doing. This is why, for instance, TMNT: Tournament Fighters is a better game than Ballz 3D despite being relative contemporaries in time period: TMNT was made by people that obviously played Street Fighter II and wanted to put their own micro and macro embellishments on the formula to give it its own facets, while Ballz 3D is a game where you can punch a clown made out of orbs apart, yet remains unfun. Mortal Kombat, a game series I very much enjoy, didn’t actually help matters in some respects with its presence, because it gave some people the idea that you can just slather tons of blood and gore over digitized actors in order to fastlane your way to infamy dollars. It’s not necessarily MK’s fault, it’s more that people just thought it was the want to see violence alone, not actually explore a game, learn the fatalities and uncover the secrets to be found.
  • Hey, guess what Tattoo Assassins is? It’s both of those things, and more. Because on top of all that, according to an anonymous account shared with one of the sources for this video, it was made inside of 8 months, which is a downright reckless and hostile timeframe for any sort of game, let alone a damn fighting game.
  • Then there’s all the other stuff we’ll get into.
• The Premise
  • Well there’s an image to start off on. Bob Gale wrote this.
  • The basic premise here is the standard world domination fare, but with the goofy lever thrown so hard, it broke off. Observe the tiny diaperman, let his lack of dignity fill you with inspiration. Observe Koldan, who we are assumedly supposed to be intimidated by, but frankly, I bet I could just push him the hell over. Observe the mysterious Ink of Ghize, which allows for the creation of living constructs when tattooed on a suitable host, causes hideous mutations when tattooed on unsuitable host, and mostly resolves in human skin as shitty stick and pokes writ large and extra embarrassing. Cool body paint, now try harder with your designs, because your cast looks like they were vandalized by kindergarteners.
  • It’s always nice to know right out the gate that you’re on the side of the inept dopes that keep getting one upped at every turn, by a dude that looks like The Nightman overdressed. This is what you get for siding with the diapermen, tattoo assassins. You brought this on yourselves.
  • Except that when you look at these characters themselves, things only get worse.
• The Characters
  • A fighting game lives and dies by its cast of characters. Having a varied and visually interesting cast is what engages the player’s senses and causes them to in turn engage with the game, by making them want to find who interests them the most, and seeing how they play. This is some pretty basic behavior among humans- we go toward the things that tweak us in pleasing or intriguing ways, while trying to ignore or shut out stuff that bores, upsets or annoys us. Yet we should lay it out in basic terms one of the most simple reasons why fighting games have rosters instead of just Player One and Player Two: player interest. When you put the idea out there that there’s not just one or two characters with fighting styles and special technques of their own, but eight, ten, twelve, 65, Everyone is Here, that says to the person holding the controller: look, there’s stuff to explore here; start your leisure-mind, you filthy animal, and engage.
  • Except this is Tattoo Assassins, a product that could only come from our unique and noxious brand of Darkest Timeline. Which is to say, there is interest in the variety of characters on display here, but it’s really more accurately described as a morbid curiosity. Let’s dive in, alphabetical-like, shall we?
  • A.C. Current: Actually, you know what, let’s not do this, fuck this. One entry in and I feel like I’m videogame Gordon Ramsay and someone’s handed me a plate of chocolate prawns and ill advised self confidence. The first time I ever heard about this game was on Progressive Boink, and the article is not something I’ve been able to dig up again, so forgive me for not remembering who wrote the article on it, but his description of AC stuck with me, to this day. That is, that he looks like Vidkid from the BK Kids Klub, age 25, seeing a vagina for the first time. I’m going to leave that description on the table, like a paperweight for this image, so we can move on.
  • Billy Two Moons: Okay. So things did not improve from previous entry, and now we’re stuck with the guy that Nightwolf thinks is a little much. Hey, guess what moves this guy has, by the way, or whose moves. Never mind that, there’s something more egregious to this character, and it’s the fact that while it’s clear by the hat the devs saw Billy Jack, I don’t think they read into that movie’s politics very much. [pause for hideous stereotype dance and soundbyte] Holy shit, game. You want to try that one again, take another shot at doing better? No? Yeah, moving on.
  • Derek O’Toole: Irish rockstar accused of terrorist activities, because I dunno, bombs, potatoes, catholicism, fuckin peat moss, why do people even bother trying when you can just do this shit. No offense to the actor portraying Derek, this is by no means a slam on him or his efforts here, but I’m just going to say, this is a much more interesting character design when portrayed as a dead person.
  • Hannah Hart: A stripper who is out for the serial killer that took the life of her friend. Tepid stock motivation, but I guess I gotta give credit, because the character wearing a backless leather dominatrix getup is actually portrayed as a sex worker, rather than whoever else videogames want to convince us also wear backless leather dominatrix outfits as part of working apparel.
  • Karla Keller: So if you just heard an internal popping or snapping sound, don’t be alarmed, that’s just your skeleton attempting to absorb the weight of one dead horse of a topical reference. Now I’m not going to go into the full description of the attack on Nancy Kerrigan in the weeks ahead of the 1994 Winter Olympics, but just let it be known that if you don’t know about this, the lady that would later go on to take Silver, Nancy Kerrigan, had a nonlethal hit taken out on her. It orchestrated by her rival, sentient pile of exposed nerves Tonya Harding, and Harding’s then husband and professional dimwit, Jeff Gillooly, which resulted in her getting bashed in the leg with a nightstick by some pawn hireling at the US Championships in Detroit. This character is a reference to that incident. It really stood the test of time, let me tell you.
  • Luke Cord: This man is a Navy SEAL, and not one of the cast members of Battle Dome. He lost the tattoo lottery when the Ink of Ghize or whatever was applied to him. The octopus, it cup he tity. It makes him look like a member of some sort of Cthulian sensuality cult, and not an individual who is here to deal in actually combative sorts of pain. People who show up to fight don’t generally have depictions of sea life caressing their nipples engraved into their skin. At least, you really hope they don’t, if they’re going to be fighting you. So I guess Luke is actually intimidating, never mind.
  • Maya: I guess the prize of being the least memorable member of the cast of a game like Tattoo Assassins is that you get the distinction of being the one that serves as the creative speedbump to people making retrospective content of your game, thus earning a measure of revenge. Have it, Maya, because at least you aren’t Billy Two Moons.
  • Takara “Tak” Hata: So the Japanese do dragons right? I mean, they have to, right, that’s a thing everywhere? So what does a Japanese dragon look like? I dunno, maybe like a double headed Barney that sort of has like a bear torso? Eh, good enough. And if in case you think I’m the one making that joke, don’t worry, I’m not, because it’s the game that does that. It’s one of the fatalities. Also, those swords are Chinese.
  • Truck Davis: A biker whose gang got killed wholesale, so now he’s riding to hell, looking for redemption. So I guess his name should actually be Bike Davis. Bike Davis. Bike.
  • Bike Davis.
  • There’s also the boss characters, who like the main cast, lack dignity. They consist of Rhina, a female bodybuilder wearing some conehead shit without dignity, Deke Kaye, a zombie whose name is too stupid for him to have dignity, Prizim, who appears to be a being from a dimension where dignity is an alien concept, and finally, Koldan himself, the Night Man, fighter of the Day Man, who will be unable to take your hand, because of his needle gloves and lack of dignity. All of these fierce competitors are felled by jumping kicks quite easily, though Koldan basically has no recovery frames, so it’s pretty much dealing with a character who has infinite hits of super armour. Prizim actually gets the shit end of the stick, because he’s apparently really fragile and blows up after a few stiff shots. He deserved to die and I hope he burns in hell.
• The Gameplay
  • I’m not going to be harsh on this front, because this game’s unfinished, unreleased for public consumption, only set loose in the wild because somebody unnamed put a dump of the prototype ROM on the internet. I could be, but when you peek behind the curtain, get some insight into what was going on at Data East and the team making this thing, you more start to empathize. This is because Tattoo Assassins is a game made under duress by a team that was thinking about bonuses on delivery of a project they thought was going to be easier than it really was. If it feels like it was made by pinball designers, who sort of got what fighting games were at the surface level, but no deeper than that, working 12 hour days on an 8 month timetable. Because that’s what it is. And it’s wrong. All of it, is wrong.
  • Granted, not quite so wrong as some games that actually saw release. I would argue that Tattoo Assassins plays more like a real fighting game than, say, Shaq Fu. This is not high praise. I’d actually not even call it praise. Because Jesus, have you ever played Shaq Fu? I’d just say that there are games out there that have less workable ideas of how this shit should go.
  • Characters move in a rough approximation of a 2D fighter. They move and jump in a way that could be considered acceptable in was there wasn’t a notable delayed response. They kick and punch in very stiff ways that, despite the stiffness, demonstrate that the team knew that spacing and poking were a part of the fighting genre. Where this falls apart is the finer details. The hitboxes in this game are a question mark, as are the priorities on moves. Weird pseudo-infinites consisting of repeatedly stand kicking an opponent in the juggle state are not only possible, the game’s AI will bust this shit out on you entirely unprompted. There’s an interesting but fully unrealized idea here, where after picking a character, you also pick a move. This move goes on to be your one button special that draws from charges, which are shown under your health bar. This is the workings of a good gimmick. It’s also barely there, because by the time it was probably implemented in the released ROM, the team most likely knew this game would never see release and were most likely just looking to fulfill their end of the contract so they could just move on to a non-doomed project. Because it really feels like that. And this is the rare case where I say I don’t mind, because I’ve worked on a project like that. It really sucks, so I can empathize.
  • Per the anonymous source, one build made for the AMOA trade show milestone lacked all but A.C Current’s ground shock special moves. This led to frustration from the devs, who at this point knew they had nothing, they had bitten off more than they can chew, and were just trying to deliver, being told their game needed work before it’d be any good.
  • They knew. They really, really knew.
• The Fatality Gimmick
  • Tattoo Assassins was going to have 2196 fatalities as part of its integral gimmick. This was a poor idea, for pretty much every reason you could imagine, except for the fact that it was pure audacity. And this was the 90s, folks, audacity sold… if marketed correctly, with resources to do so. 
  • But see, that’s the problem: you’ve got a team set to make a fighting game inside of 8 months, that is going to be installed in an arcade cabinet, a big thing primarily bought by arcade operators and amusement rental folks, an actual business investment. There’s no early access in these days, it’s a circuit board with ROM chips. So onto the already Herculean labor that is making a real-ass arcade game meant to compete with the Mortal Kombat IIs of the world in a tiny timeframe, you’ve now piled the extra effort of imagining 2196 sufficiently interesting ways to murder an opponent in a fantasy fight, making the art assets for those methods of death and then implementing those in game.
  • Which is the point where you realize this game’s development must have been a Kobayashi Maru scenario where everyone is capable of at will weaponized farting.
  • This is where you begin to see the cracks of the project itself, and part of why this game is considered such an egregious failure: because so much of the game’s effort is spent on doing something that is ultimately cosmetic, and on top of that, also looks bad. And mind you “why do this, when you could do this” is a common outside critique made by people who don’t know better, so I know how this is going to come across, but also think of matters logistically: you have HOW LONG to get HOW MUCH art done? And on top of that, make it look good and function like it should? Is 2196 really sustainable as a goal?
  • Considering the build that’s out in the wild only has a couple hundred, only a few of them are unique to certain characters, most of them consist of “I dunno, drop something on the opponent from off screen, done, dead” and all of them are really just… bad… I get the distinct feeling they realized this too.
  • There’s also the fact that having that many fatalities in a game with fatalities, sort of defeats the purpose of having fatalities in first place. When your system for allowing players to run a victory lap on their opponent, via inputting a secret combination of button presses at the end of the match, has an even chance of resulting in a kill animation from just slamming your palm on the buttons, is there actually anything special about that? Congratulations, you got a win eked out on you by somebody that you almost had, and as payment for a close match, he turns your guy into a weird edit of Whistler’s Mother. Or a Delorean runs over your opponent to remind you that Bob Gale worked on this. Or Burgertime occurs, which is actually kinda nice, because it looks like the only fatality animation that looks like the person who made it wasn’t rushing for a deadline like a dying pony express horse.
• Literally Everything Else
  • I could go on. I will. In this game’s equivalent of the MK Challenge Tower, Koldan stands at the top and tells you “NOT!!” This is a thing people used to do to each other in the 90s, shouted bluntly as sarcastic denial. This was considered funny because in the zeitgeist following Regan America, we were convinced that idiotic petty cruelty was hip. I felt that I should explain this to you, because it sucks and it terrible.
  • The music sounds like it was made by a pinball team, because it was. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but the thing about pinball music is that it’s generally a wall of sound meant to attract players to this… attraction. It’s a callout: “HEY CHECK THIS SHIT OUT, YOU GOT THE POWER, YOU GOT THE RIGHT.” [GIVE ME YOUR MONEY].
  • Fighting game music, though, is generally varied and thematic, meant to be yet another means of framing characters, giving them their own unique feel and vibe. There’s only a few music tracks in this game, and they sound like pinball bonus modes, things that are meant to heighten player excitement and heighten tension. They never end, and it’s pounding, grating, it’s like being crushed in a hybrid of a millstone and a digitized barrel organ. They add nothing to the character.
  • There is a deafeningly loud kookaburra soundbite in the jungle stage, which by the way, is what that sound is if you’ve ever heard it. That stock “jungle animal” sound? It’s an Australian bird. Anyway it’s so earsplittingly loud that I can only assume it was a stealth developer message meant to warn people against playing this.
  • The voice clips are significantly less deafening, but also utterly fucked. They don’t appear to actually be linked to any one character, and just sort of happen at random. Some of them are stock screams. Others are members of the team. This quote from Splattered Ink, Ryan Smith’s retrospective of Tattoo Assassins that you should all go read after this, basically speaks to the quality of those original soundbites:
  • All the characters have branding, because people used to think this looked good. It doesn’t, and the sheer loudness of this game shows why people don’t do this anymore, basically anywhere. Because instead of having a few good logos, icons and font choices, the game instead looks like someone dumped a thumbnail sheet out in your face.
  • The list is endless, because again, the failing company that invested time in money in Tattoo Assassins didn’t even see it as worth releasing to recoup the losses. Because it wouldn’t, it would only create more losses in trying to actually produce the machines and boards. Even the backgrounds, a simple aesthetic choice that is additive to the feel of a fighting game, rather than defining one, do nothing and inspire nothing. There’s ideas in them, but they’re so breathlessly busy, and it shows that they were working breakneck, they didn’t have time to chill on all this excess, they had to go. But fully going up to 11, and just making a level that’s a cistern of blood, doesn’t really do anything. I have no idea what goes on at Bob’s Tattoo place. Why is there just blood in the street? What’s with the Tolkien eagles? Are they getting ink done? Why does it appear to be in hell?
  • Also, what is this room? What is its purpose? Do you get anything at all from what this is?
  • This room is questionable, the result of kneejerk thinking, that there needs to be another background, so make a background. Someone had an idea, and that idea needed a background, so here, floors, walls, decorations, a background… than I have no idea what it is for, what the intent behind it is, where it exists in space and time. It is a macrocosm of Tattoo Assassins. I don’t know why, but nevertheless, here. Because someone thought it should be.

The Aftermath

The sale of Data East Pinball to Sega was writing on the wall into 1994, so much so that the impending deal made it into one of the game’s endings. By and large, the individuals that worked on Tattoo Assassins bid farewell to bad rubbish and went back to making pinball. They would never again make a fighting game, because who on this planet wants to invest time and effort in a project that the playtesters themselves couldn’t focus on, and instead played Mortal Kombat II and Virtua Fighter while at work. This saga of incompetent technicolour assassins, their bediapered tinyman Nick Fury, Needle Night Man and fuckin’ Prizm would not be released for mass consumption. And blame the constant state of mass hysteria that most capital-G Gamer types have over everything that they see everything as extremes that it’s become an urban legend that this game is held under wraps by shadowy figures with undefined mystical game powers. It isn’t, the two surviving machines are archived at the headquarters of the Professional and Amateur Pinball Association, though they almost got wrecked in a flood. Close call. Hey, come on now, I’d say that if an original print of Plan 9 from Outer Space was saved as well. This game doesn’t exist in the wild, but that doesn’t mean that it’s forgotten. It’s just that most of the people working on it wish it was forgotten.

Except for Joe Kaminkow, who when interviewed for Splattered Ink expressed his opinion on the game’s potential. “We could probably go back and make Tattoo again, I’m not sure,” he said, and the thing is, I don’t disagree with him. See I mentioned Warframe offhand at the front of the video, and originally I was just trying to show how cashflow in games has only evolved over the years. But it hit me: it was another game that was, multiple times, said to be doomed to failure. Many times, it nearly was, and the fact that it exists as it does now makes the actual game all the more amazing. Ideas can be strange, but executed well, they can sink in a hook like nothing you’ve ever seen, because they are quite literally like nothing you’ve ever seen. The idea of tattoo-based superpowers isn’t new, but it is interesting, and with games like Guilty Gear and Skullgirls, which are utterly unrestrained in their artistic view of how their own over the top cast should move and act, lord knows you could do some interesting stuff with that concept. Kaminkow then ended that statement that he wouldn’t be doing it, because he’s still doing coin-op, but his field is slot machines now. So hey, on the table, that’s a free idea if you want it chief, try to navigate that rights minefield, hey, if you want to know who owns the rights to Tattoo Assassins, it’s G-Mode, hit them up. Preferably in Japanese, I would assume.

But the thing is, for a game that was meant to be unrestrained and pure excess, which packed extreme characters and literally thousands of fatalities, which was also supposed to be developed inside of 8 months by pinball designers? No. I don’t think that game can happen. It was tried once and it was never released. And for as fraught as that development must have been to be inside, honestly? Good job, but not good enough. This game actually does play better than some fighters I’ve played, that actually were released. But it was destined for arcades, and the games I’m thinking of? Budget console releases. No dice to be had here, nor quarters downed. This game couldn’t as it was. It was too much and too little at the same time. It’s development hell, not in the typical sense of the term, a realm of unexistence for media projects supposedly forthcoming, but an actual place of suffering for the people that developed it. And if that’s not the definition of a Gamewreck to you, then I don’t know what is.