Tekken 8 was revealed during Sony’s State of Play stream on Tuesday. The first trailer, embedded above, arrives over seven years after the arcade release of Tekken 7 in 2015.
The existence of Tekken 8 was teased last month at fighting game tournament EVO, and it’s also one of the titles that appeared on a list of games that leaked from an Nvidia database last year. Nvidia said at the time that the list was “only for internal tracking and testing,” but many titles on the list have turned out to be real projects, and here’s another.
(I won’t go so far as to say that “Half-Life 2 Remastered,” which also appears on the list, is definitely real at this point, but it would be a funny way for Valve to continue rejecting the number three.)
The Tekken 8 trailer is ripe with muscles, but not with details about the fighting game. We know it’ll release on PlayStation 5, and a PC release feels very likely, given that Tekken 7 is on PC. The fine print in the trailer at least confirms that we’re seeing real-time footage running on a PS5, not a pre-rendered scene.
In a blog post (opens in new tab), Tekken 8 director Katsuhiro Harada says that the clip comes from the story mode, and that “all the character models, backgrounds, and effects are the same ones that are used in-game.” For instance, he points out that the rain drops streaming down the characters’ skin comes from “actual real-time rendering” of a game scene, and isn’t an effect created for the trailer.
It’s all a work-in-progress, Harada says.
Another interesting claim he makes is that “the Tekken series holds the record of being the longest-running story in a videogame.” Sure enough, it turns out that in 2017, Guinness certified the Tekken series (opens in new tab) as the “longest-running videogame storyline without any substantial development gaps or reboots.” It’s a hard claim to just accept, but I’d have to really think about it to disprove it, so for now I’ll say: huh.
You don’t want to lose a Guinness World Record after you have one, of course, so Tekken 8 will keep the story going, focusing on “the father and son showdown between Kazuya Mishima and Jin Kazama,” according to Harada.
Street Fighter 6 was also announced recently, and is coming out next year—Wes played it in June (opens in new tab), and was impressed. A release window for Tekken 8 hasn’t been announced, but perhaps it’ll go head to head with SF6?
For now, Harada only says that the game is “still in development,” so we’ll have to wait a little longer to find out the meaning of the trailer scene.
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