Tattoo Assassins
Apr 24, 2016 14:47:10 GMT -5
Post by lanceboyle94 on Apr 24, 2016 14:47:10 GMT -5
What I find so bizarre about this game is the Bob Gale connection, how did someone who helped write the excellent Back to The Future trilogy be involved with something this awful?
Though I assume he probably only had a hand in the basic idea of "people with magical tattoos fight" rather than any of the characters or their backstories, though if I'm wrong it's also clear that he didn't care much and probably threw in stuff like the Nancy Kerrigan type character as a joke.
The fansite linked to at the end of the article has a bit with one of the game's programmers, and he mentions that, after Data East made the Back to the Future pinball, one of DEP's lead designers, Joe Kaminkow, became really close friends with Bob Gale. Gale would send him various movie scripts that he was working on, and one of those was the "tattoos come to life" concept. Kaminkow saw it, said "let's make a game out of this" and managed to convince the main Data East headquarters to greenlight the project. He also says that Gale was involved with the characters and the story, so there is a chance that the Kerrigan reference was his.
Said programmer also notes that the lady from the character select screen (and some story snippets on the attract mode), Lyla Blue, was played by Slash's wife at the time, Rene Hudson. Data East had done a Guns'n Roses pinball around the same time as TA, and so had a bit of familiarity with him, plus the fact that she was apparently a model.