Data East's Tattoo Assassins and '90s Pop Culture

Back in the '90s there were rumors of a Mortal Kombat sequel video game containing "nudalities."

The rumor, so far as I know, was completely baseless, but it is often mentioned in connection with a different video game that actually did contain "nudalities," Tattoo Assassins.

That game never actually made it to market--apparently just a few machines sent out to trade shows and test markets before the effort collapsed. These days it is remembered, to the extent that it is remembered at all, mainly as a blatant and bizarre attempt to cash in on the success of far better-made games of comparable type.

Considering it today I do not presume to offer a description, or a review (as all my knowledge about it is secondhand, based on others' descriptions and reviews). Rather what strikes me is just how distinctly '90s the whole thing was (at least, to go by the accounts available online).

There is the kind of game it was--a fighting game for the arcade market, both of which were big in the '90s, but have long since gone bust.* However, more fundamental than that is the way that Tattoo Assassins' makers at Data East tried cashing in on the craze--by getting edgy in that EXTREME! '90s way, while also getting ironic in that '90s way. Thus they seized on those aspects that had made Mortal Kombat its own little moral panic, like the fatalities, which were pretty ridiculous to begin with, and made them more so--filling the game with vast numbers of ever more over-the-top finishing moves (2000+ according to the promotion) to the point of making a parody-of-a-parody out of them. This was even before one got to the nudalities so plainly intended to get people jaw-jawing (while, if they were mainly played for shock value and laughs, in tantalizing the audience with the prospect of seeing the digitized actresses playing its female characters in a state of undress those nudalities added a risqué touch befitting the era of Leisure Suit Larry). There was the influence of the tabloid culture that seemed to be swallowing everything up in one of the playable characters being obviously based on ice skater Nancy Kerrigan. (Meanwhile, though this happened only after the production, it seems somehow telling of this aspect of the game and its moment that the actress playing another of the principal characters--Frederick's of Hollywood model Gretchen Stockdale, who played Hannah Hart--in real life ended up in an even more lunatic media frenzy herself when, after getting a call from O.J. Simpson the night of Nicole Brown's murder as she did, she ended up a witness at the trial! So if you wanted you could make a "Nancy Kerrigan clone" fight it out with an "O.J. Simpson trial witness"--which is as '90s as it gets.) There was even a touch of that '70s nostalgia that so obsessed the pop culture makers of the decade, with another playable character a Native American named Billy apparently meant to evoke '70s icon Billy Jack.

So far as I can tell discussion of the game is overwhelmingly sneering in tone, emphasizing the game's derivativeness, and the poor workmanship that was probably unavoidable given the kind of rushed production schedule calling to mind the legend of Atari's adaptation of Steven Spielberg's E.T., as well as the undeniably lowbrow and shameless character of the gimmicks intended to make yet another Mortal Kombat knockoff stand out in a market ever-more crowded with them. Still, even if a good game all this does not make (it may say something that, so far as I know, no one has tried to patch it up and market it to gamers as a novelty if nothing else) it does, in a moment when we have enough distance from the '90s to think of it as having a distinct sensibility, a distinct aesthetic, give Tattoo Assassins an interest as a telling piece of pop cultural history (just like those now long-forgotten Billy Jack movies it evoked).

* It seems that fighting games lost their interest as complicated combat became assimilated into gaming generally--while the gameplay generally became so involved that casual gamers and button-mashers were pretty much shut out (and not just in fighting games). With arcades the issue seems to be that the gaming companies were unable to give the player a more dazzling experience than their home console for that by this point inflated quarter--and also unable to get them to part with more money than that, precipitating their decline.