Now We All Know Better!

Punishment. For all my so-called "friends" living in Brooklyn, about to move to Brooklyn, or contemplating a move to Brooklyn. I've lived there. I was a child in Brooklyn, I was an adult in Brooklyn. I'm not blindly prejudging a place I don't know. The place is tragically faux-hip. People are loathe to leave their neighborhoods, or be away from their neighborhoods for long. And who could blame them since the F train sucks, the L train's queer, God help anyone who depends on the G train. And for all that, it's still pricey as fuck-all! In fact, one day I'm going to move back to Brooklyn because that's the kind of asshole I want to be.

As punishment for all my homies abandoning Manhattan, I'm devoting an entry to "Tattoo Assassins".

What's "Tattoo Assassins", Malice?

"Tattoo Assassins" was an arcade game. Rather, it was almost an arcade game. Aimed at 1994, the game was an unapologetic Mortal Kombat klone, attempting to rip off the formula and steal its thunder by just shoveling a lot more shit into it. Mortal Kombat has "fatalities"? Well, we'll dump ten times as many fatalities in ours... dudn't matter if it looks crap.

Before all you non-gamers zone out, what I find fascinating about the "Tattoo Assassins" saga is the sheer wrong-headedness of the endeavor.

Like any art form, there's a craft in producing a good videogame. A videogame may share some basic elements with movies and television, but film/tv are non-interactive: a story plays out and you sit there and watch it. A videogame isn't passive. It requires you to participate. There is an active dialogue between the Game and the Gamer. The Gamer communicates by pressing buttons.

Again, there's a craft in making this work. Game design is serious business.

The people who created "Tattoo Assassins" never created a videogame before.

It was made by a pinball company. Based on a concept by Bob Gale, screenwriter of "Back to the Future". The development process was rushed for the sake of exploiting a trend. And after all the hooplah and press at the time, the game was ultimately never mass-produced for the public's consumption.

Scroll down and read An Insider's Report. A fascinating account from a programmer who worked on the ill-fated videogame. (The same pinball company created a Guns N' Roses pinball machine, and Slash's ex-wife is a character in "Tattoo Assassins".)

Here you can watch a succession of TA's fatality moves. Some so crudely executed, they're not even animated -- just still images on a screen. The game did feature "Nudalities" where all your opponent's clothes would fall off (the way Patrick Stewart likes it), but you'll see in the video they're strictly PG affairs.

That's grand, Malice, but it doesn't explain the Winona Ryder pics...

I adore her.