How ‘Tekken’ Became the World’s Most Popular 3D Fighting Series

For the past three decades, Tekken has been the dominant king of 3D fighting games. Plenty of competitors have come and gone, from the weapons-heavy Soul Calibur series to the highly technical Virtua Fighter, but as the generations passed and players migrated from arcades to home consoles, few have managed to remain both relevant and consistently popular as Bandai Namco’s brawler.

With a cheesy soap opera narrative, diverse characters, and a variety of worldwide martial arts represented, Tekken has become a global phenomenon with lasting staying power. Even for non-players, it’s also garnered a massive audience of passionate onlookers — from the grassroots community of the Japanese arcade scene to its huge impact on Twitch, where its appearance at the 2024 Evolution Championship Series (Evo, for short) pulled in over 270,000 viewers. It was the second most-watched tournament of the event, behind Capcom’s modern 2D champion, Street Fighter 6.

But how has Tekken managed to stay on top amid a perpetually shifting gaming landscape? At a recent 30th anniversary celebration, Rolling Stone spoke with multiple Bandai Namco team members, including the series’ shepherd and executive producer Katsuhiro Harada, and members of the game’s community about the legacy of Tekken, why it appeals to such a globally diverse audience, and the challenges it’s endured throughout the years.

The global appeal of Tekken

Although it’s commonplace today for many games to be developed with a global audience in mind, creating characters and telling stories that represent diversity, it was really the fighting game scene that helped cement the trend as far back as the early Nineties. Capcom’s Street Fighter II: The World Warrior (1991) was about choosing a brawler from an eclectic (if stereotypical) pool to travel to different parts of the world, throwing down in locations like India and Brazil.

Not long after, 1994’s Tekken followed suit, with an original cast hailing from Ireland, Russia, America, Japan, Mexico, and China. Its characters, identified by different ethnicities, cultures, and nationalities are represented with real-life martial arts styles, something other games like Street Fighter leave more as an afterthought. Having different martial arts fighters and techniques to utilize helped deepen the cultural ties to each avatar’s personality beyond mere caricature, and has helped Tekken stand apart — both in terms of the faces seen on screen and the players at the helm.

Editor’s picks

Mark Julio (also known as “MarkMan”) is a former Tekken competitor turned commentator, and as the current director of global business development for Evo, he’s been “blown away” by the diversity of the fighting game community from the beginning. “Men and women of all ages, different ethnic backgrounds, and all walks of life were able to throw down and compete like virtual gladiators,” Julio says, looking back on his early days. “It was an amazing age of discovery for me and I haven’t looked back since.”

While in Street Fighter, characters like Makoto or Juri are canonically known to be adept in karate or taekwondo, respectively, their specific martial arts expertise is not explicitly at the forefront like they are in Tekken. In the series’ most recent entry, 2024’s Tekken 8, hovering over each character reveals information about them, including which martial arts they practice alongside their nationality. For some, Tekken can spark an interest in learning more about their favorite characters’ specific practice, or even relate to those fans that already participate in the same martial arts as their favorite fighter. 

Related Content

For Tekken 8 executive producer, Katsushiro Harada, the search for new martials arts to showcase is an ongoing quest, one that isn’t necessarily reliant on pairing specific practices with the regions they’re known from. Instead, attributing new styles to culturally diverse characters is part of the fun.

During the development of Tekken 7’s final expansion pack, news broke that the 2020 Tokyo Olympics selected karate as an official medal sport for the very first time. Inspired by the spectacle, and looking for a new type of character to create, Harada introduced the karateka Lidia Sobieska, a stoic and traditionalist fighter — who also happens to be the in-game Prime Minister of Poland.

“[We] saw that there were many politicians abroad in similar roles like Prime Minister [that were in martial arts], so the [in-game] story aspect of that came about [with] an actual Prime Minister in Poland that was a woman at the time,” Harada says. “So, kind of marrying these concepts of what we wanted to do with martial arts and a karate-based character along with this very strong [woman character] who’s in a prominent role story-wise.”

Lidia would return to the franchise in Tekken 8 as part of another downloadable content release in summer of 2024.

A losing round

Since the original game in 1994, Harada has been pivotal to the series, taking on many different roles throughout the years. Early on, Harada wasn’t even involved directly in the game’s development, instead voicing the characters of martial arts master Marshall Law and mechanized ninja Yoshimitsu in the first two entries, Tekken and Tekken 2 (1995). From there, he took the reins of the series as a director for Tekken 3 (1997), Tekken 4 (2001) and Tekken 5 (2004). Now the executive producer, he remains the key creative mind behind the franchise, as well as its public face.

But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing for Harada, whose relationship with Tekken’s fandom is often comically contentious online. A big personality, the developer frequently finds himself popping up in people’s replies on platforms like X (formerly Twitter), whether it’s remarking on irksome comments or going down the rabbit hole on ludicrous requests.

For Harada, the window following Tekken 7’s release in 2015 was particularly tumultuous. Initially launched only in Japanese arcades at a period when most games would’ve also seen a home console version, the decision splintered the community. For the first two years, non-Asian countries couldn’t even play the title, which caused frustrations for many longtime fans of the franchise. Suddenly, a game considered globally-minded to its core was, well, no longer global.

The game was eventually released internationally on consoles in 2017, but the rift had already been made — especially within its esports scene, given that the majority of the world was two years behind the competition. Western fans of the franchise even had to supplement this lack of experience by ingesting YouTube videos in order to learn combos with zero hands-on practice. 

The two-year void of data, replays, and active experience also created uneasiness for professional esports players who still attempted to pursue Tekken 7 at a competitive level — even though the odds were very much stacked against them.

American Tekken 8 player and FaZe Clan member, Joseph Bennett (also known as “Joey Fury”) has first-hand experience with Tekken 7’s competitive landscape and its challenges. FaZe Clan originally started as a trio of Call of Duty players known for garnering prominence with their YouTube trick-shot videos in Modern Warfare 2. Now, FaZe Clan sponsors players in different divisions for games like Counter-Strike, Fortnite, and Apex Legends internationally — Tekken included.

Bennett has competed in more than 200 international fighting game events in his more than 20 years playing Tekken, but the disastrous state of the competitive side of Tekken 7 was a low point.

“It was definitely a setback, competitively,” Bennett says. “I can recall [attending] 7 tournaments where [players] from Korea came to the United States to compete and they had been playing the game for a year or two, and the game wasn’t even out on the console where I lived. I was just fighting them with stuff I learned by watching videos; I couldn’t even practice it myself.” 

Arcades and game centers are common in Japan, providing an intimate experience among players figuring out the mechanics of titles like Tekken — giving each other ample tricks, tips, and support with real-time feedback to better improve their combat prowess. People are there to practice, get ahead, and learn together. The arcade scene helps bolster support for the newest fighting games by community building, but the arcades in North America rarely ever have the newest fighting game entries available in the same scope.

Learning from the missteps of Tekken 7, Bandai Namco gave Tekken 8 a universal release across all regions, and even skipped the arcade entirely in favor of a dedicated home console and PC launch. The decision helped to mend the broken community, putting all players on a more even keel, and accelerated the adoption of the latest entry.

That level of unification, combined with the fact that players were now all online, rather than sequestered to arcades, was also a boon for the developers, who now had access to more data than ever. “In every region, the growth rate [for Tekken 8] was incredible,” Harada says. “It was faster to understand the game system than we had expected. The speed of research was also fast. And we played online every day. The level of the [esports] scene was higher in [8].” 

Kasumi Yogi, who manages the series’ esports presence within English-language circles, explains that the shift from 7 to 8 was a massive leap, since all players had the opportunity to start practicing at the same time. “People will have access to the game from an earlier time period,” he says. “They have more time to practice and, you know, these athletes love to practice.”

Yogi also describes how strong the Tekken community is in regions like Pakistan, South Korea, and Japan in keeping the game alive with tight-knit communities. “I learned a lot about their cultures, how Tekken brings them together, and how they practice,” Yogi says. “I love that stuff. That is really awesome. I feel like that was a huge win for us personally. I feel like we learned a lot.” 

A meaningful impact

Tekken’s commitment to cultural representation has played a huge part in its ability to endure for decades. Sometimes it manifests in little flourishes; in Tekken 8, when two characters exchange dialogue at the start of each battle, they each speak their own native language. Compare this to Street Fighter 6 — where combatants can only be in either English or Japanese — it makes a difference. French, German, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, Thai, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic are all represented and spoken by Tekken characters. 

Of course, there’s some suspension of disbelief required for the dialogue, since the roster all manage to understand each other pretty clearly despite the language barrier, but there is an innate respect for Tekken’s diverse ethnic player base by having a character from Brazil speak Portuguese or a character hailing from Peru or Spain speaking Spanish. Tekken’s roster is more fully realized through this authenticity. It feels normal. It pushes beyond the limits of basic caricature into creating fleshed-out characters by representing and voicing multiple languages. 

Producer Michael Murray believes that the characters as a whole are key to the series’ longevity. “Tekken has so many of them. And that they’re so unique that I think there’s always one that you’re drawn to whether that’s the look of the character — they’re a devil or they’re a pretty girl,” Murray says. “But it’s also what kind of fighting style they use, or the spoken lines that they say. The characters are the draw to the game throughout the series.”

Middle Eastern and North African characters, like Tekken’s Shaheen and Street Fighter’s Rashid, garnered massive excitement for each of their reveal trailers, but only one of them (Shaheen) has actual dialogue in Arabic; Rashid only has English or Japanese options. 

Tekken’s enduring impact isn’t solely derived from the characters and their nationalities, but also on its strength as a fighting game — the rush, techniques, and gameplay maneuvers bring excitement to onlookers at tournaments. “It’s the one game where [when] you are watching it, you think you can do it and want to try it [yourself],” Harada says. “To step in and take control of the game.”

Tekken producer Michael Murray believes that the series unapologetically grabs people with its snappy and engaging gameplay. “The way that Tekken feels and plays. You get hooked on it and keep playing because of that,” Murray says. “That ease of access to play just one round goes towards another round, and then another, before you begin to realize, you are now a Tekken fan.”

That slick gameplay is paired with gorgeous environments, and the two meet head-on with one of Tekken’s oldest features: multi-leveled, destructible environments. Although early games like Mortal Kombat allowed players to interact and sometimes kill opponents with stage hazards, in Tekken, there’s a special kind of attention paid to the level of detail when an enemy gets viscerally kicked through a plate glass wall into a courtyard a full story down. 

The over-the-top ludicrousness is baked into every aspect of the game, from its technical systems to its more bizarre character designs. “The way that one character goes totally flying into the wall when they get hit by an attack or some kind of [wild] aerial juggle [combo],” Harada says, “these are the kinds of things that are just impactful and make you want to play it.”

He adds, “And bear. Bear!” 

The bear Harada enthusiastically refers to is the martial arts-trained cub Kuma who has been prominent in all mainline iterations. Although it seems like kind of a joke, Tekken World Tour 2024’s champion Jeong “Rangchu” Hyeon-ho won his crown with his devastating and relentless Kuma mastery.

Game director Kohei Takeda muses about how he has experienced Tekken through many different lenses over the past three decades, first as a Tekken player in the local arcades, then also as a member of the press covering Tekken 4 to 6 — even interviewing Harada himself previously. “Tekken has always had many challenges over the years. Not difficulties, but lofty goals we try to achieve,” Takeda says. 

As a publisher, Bandai Namco has a deep bench of different classic IPs that have pervaded throughout the past several decades — games like Time Crisis, Pac-Man, and Ridge Racer; but not all of them have continued to get regular release. ”Many times, it’s not solely up to whether that franchise is popular or not,” Harada says. “It’s many factors. Economic or maybe corporate — various [aspects] go on behind the scenes.”

Harada is known for being very open towards his fans when they have approached him or asked for pictures in public. You do not need to scroll too far on the social feed to see him posing with players, peers, and fans with his signature fist in the air. 

“Tekken has continued for 30 years — one of the things is that the community has been a huge support for [me],” he says. “[One] reason [I] was able to continue being part of the [Tekken] project is because of the community and how they’ve supported [me] over the years.”