Back when Mortal Kombat was only just making its impact felt in the world of arcades, Data East's North American office decided it would create its own take on the digitised one-on-one fighter.
With a story penned by none other than Back to the Future co-scriptwriter Bob Gale, Tattoo Assassins promised over two thousand different fatalities (a fib, as it turned out) and even "nudalities" which stripped your opponent. Some of the more inventive fatalities included a DeLorean running over your rival (a nod to Gale's aforementioned movie career) and references to other Data East games, such as BurgerTime.
However, the tight development deadline of nine months wasn't met, and Data East Pinball (AKA Stern) was then snapped up by Sega, leaving the game unreleased.
While many of the units produced for location tests were destroyed, at least two working examples of Tattoo Assassins are out in the wild, and the game's ROM was dumped some time ago. However, while playable, it's full of bugs and glitches—which makes the recent announcement by exA-Arcadia of a revival all the more surprising.
exA-Arcadia—which has its own arcade standard—has worked with the rights holders to Data East’s games to bring the project back to life using the original source code. The game will be finished and rebalanced, along with bug fixes and new content. It will also run a high resolution for modern-day screens, and include scanline filters, low input lag and more.
Will all of this effort result in a better game? That remains to be seen, but it's encouraging to see this unreleased cult classic finally become complete.