exA-Arcadia Announces Data East’s Tattoo Assassins

Out of all the brand new arcade-exclusive fighting game announcements to be coming out of exA-Arcadia, all being made as part of the company’s appearance and exALive video streams from EVO Japan 2025, one was teased behind the scenes that seemed to likely hold the most interest for Western audiences. On its last day, that has now came. Let’s talk about Tattoo Assassins…

The Original Tattoo Assassins

First, a little bit of a history lesson. If you’ve been around online for a while, then chances are that you’ve come across the tale of Tattoo Assassins – or you’ve fired it up out of curiosity in MAME, or maybe even played it over at The Galloping Ghost Arcade. It feels like a meme at this point, and of course plenty of people see it and wonder, “What were they thinking?”.

Well, it’s easy to ask that in hindsight, especially now when we live in an age where leaps in graphical tech have become scarce. At the time when digitization or “Mode 7” or texture mapped 3D polygons were new, there was a strong desire to capitalize on the New Hotness, and what better way to do that than to come up with your own game that used the technique – or if you had a limited budget, copy it. The former could lead to success (see all of the 3D racers that followed in Daytona USA’s wake), but the latter would often result in disaster – as Tattoo Assassins became for Data East.

The long story short, Tattoo Assassins was an attempt by the pinball division at Data East – who later became Sega Pinball, then Stern Pinball – to jump onto the Mortal Kombat craze, which was still on the ascent back in 1994. The design team was led by DE’s own Joe Kaminkow, and the company hired the Oscar nominated writer for Back To The Future movies, Bob Gale, to craft the story. Said story involved a kind of “living ink”. Everything seemed to be in place for a Mortal Kombat-killer… until the game went on test, where it bombed and was quietly shelved. Of course, it couldn’t escape the mockery of the internet, when that would bring it back to light a few years later… and now, it is gaining even more prominence.

Tattoo Assassins Revival

exA-Arcadia has now been working with Data East’s current rights holders to finally bring this never finished game back to life. Simply titled Tattoo Assassins, exA have resurrected the original project’s source code and assets, allowing them to bring a “perfect port” to the table, along with “new balancing, bug fixes and content”. This will include visual upgrades so that the game fills out 1080p/4K monitors, scanline filters, low input lag, and working on the character balancing so that the play experience is more satisfying with what players expect from a fighting game.

All of the games fatalities and variations (including animalities, nudalities and such), along with characters, remain intact. But, things are still early, to the point that all we have is this information that was passed along, and this image above.

We’ll provide updates as possible, but what do you think about this game making a comeback? What would you like to see come from it?

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