by: Dr. Boogie
Back in the early 90s, some developers thought they had stumbled upon the next step in graphics technology: digitizing. Rather than hiring artists to painstakingly create characters from scratch, and draw out every single frame in their animation, companies would use actors to dress as the characters and perform various actions that would be filmed and added to a game. It was quite innovative. It also looked like crap, and the practice was mercifully discontinued after a few years.
During that period, however, Mortal Kombat was the king. If you were a game developer, and you could make a game that beat MK, you could write your own check in the world. Here's the story of a game that couldn't beat MK at its own game. The story of a game called Tattoo Assassins.
The challenge for Data East was to get a chunk of the MK pie. To do that, they devised a plan to create and publish their own fighting game in a period of only eight months. The result: nonstop 12-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week shifts for the programmers, artists turning out the only kind of garbage they could make on the fly, and overall, just a real piece of shit. They even got Bob Gale, the guy who wrote Back to the Future, to write a story for the game, but even that couldn't save it. It also probably didn't help that this was all being undertaken by the pinball division of Data East.
Long story short, the game sucked like a hungry black hole, and it never went into production. They made two cabinets in total: one that still sits in the company office, and another in a private collection that was tragically lost in a flood. Luckily, someone had the presence of mind to upload the rom dump to the internet, and now you too can see what Data East was working on for all those months.
The story for the game goes down like this: Mullah Abba, a grown man in diapers, has discovered a magic ink that can come to life for brief periods of time. You could use it to tattoo people, too, but only certain people could receive the tattoos without coming to harm. One of those lucky few was a guy named Koldan, who then wanted to take over the world. Mullah Abba then sends his "color guard" to find nine people worthy of the ink in the hopes that at least one would be able to stop Koldan. Unfortunately, Koldan then possessed every last one of them, but Mullah Abba had one more trick up his sleeve: a woman named Lyla Blue, who will allow you, the player, to possess one Tattoo Assassin and take on Koldan and the rest... IF YOU DARE!!!
And it's all downhill from there. Don't believe me? Well then, let's take a look at your "champions":
Maya
By the way, you'll notice the "someone wants him/her dead" angle in most of these character backstories. Also, I'm sure you've noticed that the artists had to draw on some eyes because the model's eyes didn't turn out very well when they digitized this photo. That happens a lot, as well.
Billy Two Moons
Billy is not portrayed by David Duchovny. He's also not portrayed by an actual Native American either. To offset this noticeable problem, the designers made it a point to have Billy make a lot of the sorts of noises you'd expect to hear from old Cowboys and Indians movies. He even chants "hey-ya hey-ya hey-ya" when he wins a fight.
Truck Davis
Two things: First of all, he's a biker named "Truck". Secondly, that's one of the worst bald caps I've ever seen.
AC Current
He's wanted by Interpol and his former employers, but he still looks so happy! And look at the size of that head!! It must be from all the knowledge you need in order to be a "cyber-mercenary".
Tak Hata
If a Fu Manchu ‘stache doesn't convince the people that you're a Japanese man, I don't know what will.
Luke Cord
What a shame. The one actor whose eyes didn't need to be redrawn, and that's the best expression he could come up with. I guess having a torso-length octopus tattooed on you can be a bit disorienting.
Hannah Hart
She is built like a stripper, and she does have a convincing stripper name, but the actress portraying Hannah is actually a former cheerleader for the Dallas Cowboys. In a way, she's overqualified to be in this game.
Derek O'Toole
They got the "tool" part right, at least.
Karla Keller
Can anyone out there say that they saw something like this coming? A character in a fighting game based off of the Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding incident at the '94 Winter Olympics? I had to pick her as my character, not because she had the creepiest stare and the oiliest chest, but because the designers really wanted to drive home the whole Nancy Kerrigan parody by making her wear her skates during the fights:
And who said subtlety was dead?
Anyway, I set out to try and beat the game with Karla. I was a little worried because, as longtime readers of the site are no doubt aware, I am awful at fighting games. For some reason, I just can't seem to perform the right moves and remember the right combos, no matter what I'm playing. Imagine my relief, then, when I discovered that you can beat the entire Tattoo Assassins game using only jumpkicks and uppercuts. Thank god this isn't like Mortal Kombat, or Street Fighter, or any other fighting game, where the computer eventually wises up when you use the same trick over and over again.
And so I fought. Here's the thing: all that I've told you up to this point is kind of funny, right? If it's not supposed to be, I'm sure some writer must've cried himself to slip every day for the rest of the 1990s. Anyway, as silly as the premise and character art are, the game itself is just plain terrible: the collision detection is awful, the background art would look bad even if you were playing this game on a Sega Genesis, and the sound effects are ridiculous. The soundbank for the game uses a lot of pre-recorded screams for big hits, and the designers didn't bother to separate the screams based on gender, so you've got buxom female fighters whose voices drop two octaves after they take a roundhouse kick. My favorite sound moment, however, came in the jungle stage, when the sounds of battle were temporarily sidelined to subject you to an unnecessarily loud monkey screech. Now that's how you create a tense atmosphere.
It's obvious that this game wasn't going to surpass MK in terms of gameplay, and it definitely wasn't going to do it with graphics either. How were the developers planning to compete with this turkey? One word: fatalities. The bulk of the controversy surrounding MK was because of its fatalities, and that game seemed to do pretty well in the market. To top MK, then, it was clear what the designers would have to do. They would have to create a game with hundreds and hundreds of different fatalities.
And that's exactly what they did.
Now I'm not about to document every single fatality from this game, partly because there are so many, but mostly because the majority of them are really lame and/or look like crap. Instead, I've gathered a handful of some of the more interesting kills:
A DeLorean comes and runs over your opponent. And yes, the animation is that bad. I almost went with just a still shot, but you all deserve to see the full crappiness in motion.
Tak's tattoo a two-headed beast tosses out an egg that hatches into a giant two-headed Barney the Dinosaur-like character, and your opponent dies for some reason. Someone call PBS!
If you do nothing but block repeatedly during the time for entering fatality codes, your opponent's head will pop off for no reason at all. I guess he was bored to death.
Your opponent turns into a hotdog and runs off the screen. Right?
Now this is a fatality I can get behind. Classic Burgetime reference? Check. Gameplay as fun as Burgertime? Working on it.
I saved the most bizarre fatality for last:
I think David Lynch helped create this fatality. You character bends over, and a turkey on a plate falls out of his/her ass. When the turkey hits the other player, it tosses your opponent back, and splits into several more turkeys that bounce around the room. If one hits you, you get tossed back just like your opponent. If this is just a bug, what the hell was this even supposed to be?
The game also featured "nude-alities". These were just a rumor in the MK series, but they actually made one for every character in this game. Basically, a puff of smoke, and your opponent would be shown nude, with hands and arms covering up the good stuff.
That was not a great day to be a digitized actor.
There's also supposed to be a fatality, or at least a move of some sort, that allows you to shoot diarrhea all over your opponent, but damned if I could figure out what it was. The closest I could get was this move:
Fire is hardly the same as diarrhea.
But wait, there's more!
During the game's attract mode, a screen pops up asking, "who are the mutants?" Permit me to answer that question by revealing that they are, in fact, the three boss characters you fight just prior to your big showdown with Koldan. They're kind of interesting as characters, but they don't really have much going for them as sub bosses in a fighting game. Fortunately, the programmers found a back door for this: rather than improving the AI for the sub bosses, they simply sped up all their animations. At first glance, it looks like they're merely moving a lot faster, but as soon as you uppercut one, you'll notice that they rise and fall much faster than any other opponent in the game. So fast, in fact, that your character doesn't even have time to come out of the uppercut animation. Luckily, the AI is still trash, and they can be beaten just as easily as any of the other fighters you've encountered up to this point in the game.
Still, let's take a look at them anyway:
Rhina
A female bodybuilder with an enormous horn on her head. Is there anything I can really say about this character to make it more poignant? Well, she charges in a way you'd expect from someone with a horn on their forehead, and that can lead to some very cheap combo attacks.
Deke Cay
You see what they did there? Ingenious. An actual zombie is the second of your boss opponents. Unfortunately, the developers spent all their money on digitizing all the players, and so they had to put together a zombie costume using only what they could get on the cheap from a Halloween store. Of course, he'll be moving too fast for you to notice his shoddy costume, most of the time anyway.
Now, for example, is one of those times. Moving on...
Prizm
Out of the three mutants, Prizm is probably the least ridiculous-looking. A skeleton encased in a humanoid-shaped crystal? Cool! There are a few tiny snags. The first is that no matter how hard you hit the guy, he won't fall down, which isn't surprising given how hard it would be for the actor to fall without wrecking the whole costume. That minor detail is kind of odd, but the real kicker is this: it only takes four blows to kill Prizm. That's right, a mere four hits will kill the final character standing between you and Koldan. Add to it the fact that Prizm is so large it's almost impossible NOT to hit him with a jump attack, and you've got yourself the worst possible henchman for an evil tattoo lover.
Speaking of which, how about that final boss:
Koldan
The only thing that separates Koldan from any of the other male characters in the game is that he has some gloves that were clearly inspired by Freddy Krueger's trademark glove, only Koldan's gloves have hypodermic needles on the fingers instead of blades (which is still a rip-off of Elm Street 3). He is by far the fastest player in the game, but in the end, he's just as lame and stupid as every fighter before him, and he can be beaten using a mixture of jumpkicks and uppercuts. Or just jumpkicks, if you like. When you finally kill him, he melts down, and then blows up:
By the way, what you're seeing now is a result of me slowing down the animation a bit. You see, by speeding up the character, the programmers also sped up the spectacular way that he died. Well, whatever. It's not like there's any shortage of blood in the game.
Your reward for finally killing the evil Koldan and... freeing the magic tattoo ink for good, I guess, is that you get so see your character's ending...
... which was not programmed in by the time the project was canned. Bummer. I wonder why the programmers didn't get to it. It's not like they were too busy fixing the AI, or the collision, or the physics. Oh well. I'll just have to speculate on the meaning of that picture of Karla with the copyrighted ears on her head. Here's a guess:
Me: "Hey Karla! You just won the fight of your life! What are you going to do next?"
Karla: "I'm going to Disney World!!!"
I really don't know of what else to say about this game. I mean, everything about it is so bad as to seem comical. It's got dozens and dozens of gag fatalities, a Native American character that whoops and hollers like the Indians in spaghetti westerns, a Nancy Kerrigan-inspired fighter, and it was being made by the division of a company that specialized in pinball games! I honestly can't believe this was an actual game that someone wanted to make. At the same time, though, I'm glad they made it.
My hat's off to you, Tattoo Assassins. You are one in a million.
And thank god for that.
Have any questions or comments about this piece?
Email Dr. Boogie
For your viewing pleasure, here's footage of some fatalities from Tattoo Assassins:
If you enjoyed this piece, be sure to check out:
Reader Comments
"the few, the pale, the cyber-mercenaries"
FLAMED!
i don't suppose there's anyone with the resources AND interest to do it now, though
i don't suppose there's anyone with the resources AND interest to do it now, though
"IT'S ALL RIGHT MA'AM, EVERYTHING'S GOING TO BE FINE. I'M FROM THE INTERNET."
I couldn't possibly endure what you endured to make this article happen. I would have just cried at looking at the intro and thinking that I had to play it.
"Ugh. It's 3am, I've been working for the past 11 hours, and I need to come up with some more fatalities. Okay... a bird. It eats a guy, it claws a guy, it craps on a guy, it pecks a guy... ok, that's four right there. 200 to go..."
And, I thought War Gods had stupid character concepts.
And, the graphics are really horrible. I guess the MK games are the only decent games to use digitized actors.
Anyway, thank you Dr. Boogie for writing this article. It was hilarious and serves as a guide of how not to make a fighting game (which is useful since I am actually making one).
I don't think they would have had any copyright issues calling it DISNEYLAND TODAY do you?
-There's the gory Fatalities;
-the animalities;
-the reversed animalities (turns the other player into an animal);
-The nudalities;
-the dressalities;
-and the whatthebloodyfuckisthisalities.
I remember that there was a very damaging move: up, right, up, right, up, right, up, right while holding block, then press punch. Your character would then turn around and fire acidic diarrhea at your opponent. If you got hit by it, say good-bye to 25% of your health.
If you get that to work, throw up a screenshot for us!
you get to pick one of three specials after you pick a character
Anyway, great article. Where can we find the rom?
What made MK popular was the blood and the fatalities, and the fact that the game still played well for a fighter.
I think there's pics at the bottom of this review.
I thought he was full of shit. I need to find my 4rth grade yearbook cause I owe someone an apology. To be fair would anyone in my shoes have believed him?
SEE?! It's so crazy it forces me to use slang!
FOR SHAME TOTTOO ASSASSINS!
Ow my lungs. I haven't laughed this hard in a long time.
I only wish Midway had hired the brilliant mind that dreamed up shitting cooked turkeys at someone as a fatality.
Let's check the checklist for this game.
1) Idiotic names? Check.
2) Stereotypes? Check.
3) Puns? ...Ugh, check.
4) Many, MANY "WTF" Moments? ...Check.
Am I missing anything?
But seriously, why join the service when i can be a "Tattoo Assasin" instead? Thanks alot, High School "Career Day"!!!
"JEEZ-LA-WHEEZ!!! WHAT-IS-THAT?!"
Never seen anything so disturbingly trashy since Jax's MK3 fatalities.
" Whistler's Mother?" WTF?!
Fighting games were quite abundant back in the nineties, but I sucked so hard at them that I wasn't all that interested. At least until I started to get an edge for The King of Fighters series.
When I take a look at a huge pile of steaming shit like this I wonder how can some respectable videogame company can come with such abomination. Makes me think that they had an urge for some easy money.