News From the Vid Side of the Arcade
- Jason
- May 13
- 3 min read
I spend a lot of time focused on the pinball side of arcade stuff here on this site, with good reason...pinball is awesome lol, but let's not forget the other side of the arcade - the Vids. This morning I have a couple of news items on video games.
First up, is donuts, or for those of you who spell it weird doughnuts lol. Why donuts? Well, Krispy Kreme just launched a special collaboration with Bandai Namco for Pac-Man-themed donuts. They come in three varieties:
Team Ghost - an unglazed donut shell filled with chocolate cream
Strawberry Power Berry - an unglazed donut shell filled with strawberry cream
Pac-Man Party - an original glazed donut with yellow buttercream flavored icing
and are available from now through June 1st.
Here's some news from the awesome arcade news website Arcade Heroes. ExA-Arcadia, a newish modular system for arcades - along the lines of a modern New Geo, has announced that it is going to bring a long lost arcade game to market.
The never officially released game is a Mortal Kombat clone from Data East called Tattoo Assassins. At the time, Data East actually partnered with the the Oscar-nominated writer Bob Gale, whose work includes the Back To The Future movies, to create the story for the game.
I believe that there is only one functional Tattoo Assassins cabinet in the world at the moment. It resides at the famous Galloping Ghost Arcade in Brookfield, Illinois. I actually took pictures of that very cabinet for everyone on a trip there last year (see below).
Check out the awesome story of the game below.
exA-Arcadia Announces Data East’s Tattoo Assassins
Next is a story that I stumbled across while looking around for arcade news last night. Yesterday I mentioned how Spooky Pinball may have the rights to produce a game based on the 1984 film The Gremlins, so this story is particularly timely.
Back in the 80's while they were filming Gremlins, the child actors had long stretches of down time from filming when the animatronic Gremlin creatures needed to be repaired. The film's Executive Producer, Steven Spielberg, allowed the actors to relax in his office on the set...which just so happened to be filled with iconic 1980's arcade cabinets like Missile Command, Millipede, Food Fight and Pole Position!
One of the actors, Zach Galligan, thought that he was hot stuff and challenged Spielberg to a game of Pole Position...and got absolutely crushed by the famous filmmaker Haha.
Steven Spielberg was an arcade game shark in the '80s, as Gremlins star Zach Galligan will attest after a brutal game of Pole Position
It turns out Steven Spielberg is a gamer, and he enjoys wiping the floor with his young actors
Last up, I have a cool new compilation of classic arcade games that's hitting consoles this week - Capcom Fighting Collection 2.
The new game features a collection of the following classic Capcom fighters:
Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000 Pro
Capcom vs. SNK 2: Mark of the Millennium 2001
Capcom Fighting Evolution
Street Fighter Alpha 3 UPPER
Power Stone
Power Stone 2
Project Justice
Plasma Sword: Nightmare of Bilstein
The games are playable on-line or locally. I'm a sucker for compilations of classic games like this, because they usually contain additional historical documents and pictures. Sure enough, Fighting Collection 2 comes with over 700 pieces of artwork from all 8 titles, never-before-seen development documents used to make the original games and over 300 tracks of music from the original arcade games that players can listen to at any time.
Nice. I'm definitely buying this on Steam on Thursday. It also will be available for the Nintendo Switch, PS4 and XBox One.
Have you seen the episode of What Happened on YouTube from Matt McMuscles about the history of Tattoo Assassin? It’s great