“If you look at the worldwide sales for the series, as well as the arcade income data, or even just the marketing research, Tekken has sold the most copies of any fighting game in the world”, he told me. Tekken’s executive producer Katsuhiro Harada, who was present at the preview event, is proud of the Tekken’s series’ strong casual fan base. Tekken has always had an agreeably simple system, where each of the four face buttons matches up to one of your character’s limbs, and all you’ve ever needed are those buttons and the stick. I came into the Tekken 7 preview event with some trepidation – I’m very much a casual fighting game player, and Tekken 6’s story mode did nothing for me – but I came away surprisingly hungry to keep playing. There’s a new story mode, The Mishima Saga, along with the online options you’d expect. The main impression I had at the time was that Tekken 7 was one of the best-looking games around, but I was soon pulled away by all the novelty air-hockey variants and mech battle games.Ĭut to 2017, and Tekken 7 is finally making its way to consoles and PC, along with all the tweaks and changes made for the Fated Retribution arcade update released last year. My first hands-on time with the game, in fact, came during a holiday I took to Tokyo late that year, during which I spent much of that trip stalking through Akihabara’s numerous arcades, trying to pick machines that would suit my gaijin ignorance and which were far from any smokers. Tekken 7 has been playable in Japanese arcades since March 2015. It turned into a big problem' - Katsuhiro Harada, exec producer

'There was a video of a man's dog being headlocked by a kangaroo, and he punched it in the face. And other stuff we learned from entering the King of Iron Fist tournament.

Tekken 1 kuma