Tattoo Assassins
Tattoo Assassins was a fighting game developed to combat the popular Midway franchise Mortal Kombat. Developed by Data East, Tattoo Assassins combined the talents of Joe Kaminkow (leader of Data East's Pinball division) and Bob Gale (screenwriter for Back to the Future). They set out to create a game that was better than Mortal Kombat. Using the same digitized graphics as Mortal Kombat, Tattoo Assassins featured real life actors fighting each other with violent moves and combos. Most notable is that the game featured over 200 Fatalities, including Nudalities (only a rumor in Mortal Kombat) and Animalities (before they were featured in Mortal Kombat 3). Some fatalities were very off-the-wall, even for a fighting game from that era. Such fatalities included dropping a DeLorean car onto one's opponent (a Back to the Future reference), and massive diarrhea.
Fights in the game revolved around 2 digitized characters beating each other up. The catch with this game was that all of the characters had magical tattoos, which came to life when they performed special attacks and finishing moves. Even though the game was never finished, EGM actually posted an in-depth article with moves and information about all of the characters.
Internal development strife, management problems and deadline woes eventually led to Tattoo Assassins downfall. Feedback from game testers was also negative, and its chances of competing against other recently released games like Killer Instinct and Primal Rage did not look promising. Thus, Tattoo Assassins was never put into production. (Wikipedia)