Tekken | Code Like It's 198x

Tekken began as an experiment in moving a polygon person. Katsuhiro Harada, who joined its team in his first year at Namco, told Edge in 2013 that it “wasn’t designed as a fighting game initially”: the aim was “to prove that they could create a 3D character that would respond to your inputs”, and to do it at 60 frames a second, twice the speed of Sega’s Virtua Fighter. The experiment ran on new hardware, the System 11 arcade board that Namco and Sony had built from the PlayStation’s chips. When the PlayStation version arrived in 1995 it was, for once, what Edge called “arcade perfect”.

Fast facts

Developer: Namco. Director and lead designer: Seiichi Ishii.
Hardware: Namco System 11, the first game on the board.
Arcade release: Japan, December 1994.
Home version: PlayStation (Japan, March 1995, ¥5,800; Europe and North America, November 1995).
Controls: a joystick and four buttons, one for each limb: left punch, right punch, left kick, right kick.
Fighters: eight, plus a boss, Heihachi, and further hidden characters in the PlayStation version.
Sales: a million PlayStation copies by the end of 1995; Lotek64 called it the first game on the machine to reach that figure.

A Virtua Fighter veteran at Namco

Seiichi Ishii had worked on Virtua Racing and, as a motion designer, on Virtua Fighter at Sega’s AM2 before moving to Namco, where he directed Tekken and worked on Tekken 2. Harada remembered him as “completely focused on the 3D, the models and the framerate”. Namco was not trying to make a fundamentally different game from Virtua Fighter, Harada said: “Our entire focus was on pushing the technological boundaries.” Ridge Racer had put textures on polygon cars; Tekken would put them on polygon people.

Harada’s own job was to “balance the game, work on timing and frame data”. He admitted the result was rough: “there were certain moves that couldn’t be blocked. In truth, it wasn’t very well balanced at all.”

System 11

The board had its roots in Namco’s deal with Sony. According to Namco’s Shegeichi Nakamura (the spelling Edge printed), speaking in 1995, Tekken was already planned for the System 22 board that ran Ridge Racer, to fight Sega’s Virtua Fighter 2 on Model 2. “If we had done that, the machine’s price would have been expensive. But when Sony came along we decided to go for a low-cost system — in short, we’ve left the big arcade stores to Sega and VF2 and Tekken has been sold to smaller arcade centres.” System 11 was two boards: one carrying the PlayStation’s graphics processor and CPU, the other Namco’s own sound chips, with extra video memory and RAM.

Edge first saw the game half-finished in January 1995, after it had drawn crowds at the Amusement Machine Show in Tokyo and been shown privately in America under the name Rave War. It called Tekken (“Iron Fist”) “a conventional — albeit impressive — Virtua Fighter clone”, and noticed the controls: “there’s a single button for each hand and foot. In theory, this makes the fighting more instinctive and special moves easier to learn.”

One button per limb

Street Fighter II had given players light, medium and heavy attacks. Tekken asked instead which limb to use. Each fighter’s four limbs had their own character: “Certain characters can manage only a jab with their left arm, for example, while their right arm is able to deliver a meatier, more substantial blow,” Edge explained. A floored fighter could get up, roll towards or away from danger, or “flip directly back into the fray with an attack”. Throws and slams switched the camera to the best angle to watch them.

The eight fighters were a mixed bunch, as Edge described them: Kazuya, the lead character and the one “those starting out will opt for”; Paul, “the American member of the troupe”; Law, “a Bruce Lee type”; King, who “merely dons an intricate face mask for battle”; Michelle, with “a penchant for intricate but solid slams and throws”; Nina, “Tekken’s only British-bred fighter”; Jack, “a cybernetic organism”; and Yoshimitsu, “a metal-clad warrior with sharp blades at each arm”, who could spin until he fell over. Kazuya’s father Heihachi waited at the end as the boss. The fights took place in real places, among them Venice, Fiji, the Acropolis and, as Edge noticed with some surprise, Lake Windermere.

The PlayStation version

The PlayStation game went on sale in Japan in March 1995 at ¥5,800, and Edge gave it nine out of ten. It ran at 60 frames a second, “the same speed as the Virtua Fighter 2 coin-op”. Its fighters, Edge judged, moved better even than Virtua Fighter’s motion-captured ones: those “move with a breathtaking level of accuracy, they still fall way short of Tekken’s standards”. The home version added a pre-rendered introduction, arranged versions of the arcade music on CD, nine extra boss characters to unlock, and a playable copy of Namco’s Galaga during the eight-second load. “Tekken rips up the rule book,” the review ended, “and delivers an experience that even its £2000 coin-op namesake can’t match.” Its complaints were flat backgrounds and the odd polygon glitch.

Later that year Edge named Tekken among the games that used “modern motion capture techniques”, with Virtua Fighter and Lore Design’s Highlander; see motion capture.

The Official UK PlayStation Magazine’s first issue, in November 1995, reported that the Japanese version had been “one of the biggest selling titles” for five months, with the PAL release due that month at £45 to £50. By the end of 1995, the German magazine Lotek64 later wrote, Tekken had sold a million copies, something no PlayStation game had done before. Wireframe put the point in a sentence: the game “showed home gaming was no longer in the shadow of its coin-munching brethren”.

The series

Namco moved fast. Edge previewed Tekken 2 in September 1995, four months after the PlayStation release, again on System 11, with redrawn backgrounds, redesigned fighters, two new characters, Lei and Jun, and Heihachi and Kazuya swapping roles as playable fighter and boss. It reached the PlayStation in 1996, and in November that year Sony’s Teruhisa Tokunaga told Edge that “Tekken 2 in Japan has exceeded one million units”. Tekken 3 (1997) moved to the new System 12 board; Edge later held up its fighters shadow-boxing before a bout as “a shining example” of motion capture, performed by “two real martial artists”, one of them “an expert in Capoeira-based combat”. Tekken Tag Tournament followed in arcades in 1999, and on the PlayStation 2 in 2000.

Ishii left to found Dream Factory, which made Tobal No. 1 for Square in 1996. Katsuhiro Harada stayed and became the series’ public face, as its director and producer. Edge reported in 2013 that the series had sold “some 44 million copies worldwide”. Tekken 7 went on to sell more than 11.8 million copies, the most of any game in the series, and Tekken 8, released in January 2024, sold 2 million in its first month, Bandai Namco said. In December 2025 Harada announced that he would leave Bandai Namco at the end of the year, as the series approached its 30th anniversary.

Sources

Edge issue 16, January 1995: PlayStation news (Tekken on System 11, jointly developed by Sony and Namco) and p. 30 (Tekken prescreen: JAMMA and Rave War, “Iron Fist”, “a single button for each hand and foot”, the eight characters and the stages, arcade release in December and PlayStation in March).
Edge issue 21, June 1995: Tekken review (PlayStation), nine out of ten (¥5,800; “arcade perfect”; 60 frames a second; the limb controls; the fighters; the extras and the loading Galaga); and the box “System 11: Namco’s PlayStation coin-op” (Shegeichi Nakamura on System 22 and the smaller arcades; the two boards).
Edge issue 24, September 1995: Tekken 2 prescreen; “Motion capture” feature, pp. 60–65 (Tekken among the games using motion capture).
Official UK PlayStation Magazine issue 1, November 1995: Tekken preview (Japanese sales; November PAL release; £45–£50).
Game Informer issue 42, October 1996, and Edge issue 34, July 1996: Seiichi Ishii’s work on Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter, Tekken and Tekken 2, and Dream Factory.
Edge issue 38, November 1996: Teruhisa Tokunaga on Tekken 2’s Japanese sales.
Edge issue 42, February 1997: Tekken 3 on the System 12 board.
Edge issue 61, August 1998, p. 60: Tekken 3’s motion capture.
Edge issue 73, July 1999: Tekken Tag Tournament in arcades. Issue 84, May 2000, p. 68: Tekken Tag Tournament (PlayStation 2) review.
Computer & Video Games issue 200, July 1998: Heihachi as Kazuya’s father.
Edge issue 258, October 2013, “An Audience With… Katsuhiro Harada”, pp. 84–87 (the game as a 3D test; 60 frames a second; Harada’s balancing work; Ishii as director and lead designer, formerly a motion designer on Virtua Fighter).
Edge 2013 Christmas edition (issue 261): the series’ 44 million sales.
Lotek64 issue 12, December 2004: PlayStation history (Tekken’s million sales by the end of 1995).
Wireframe issue 50, April 2021: Tekken’s home release.
Wikipedia, “Tekken (video game)” (web, secondary): the exact arcade and PlayStation release dates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tekken_(video_game)
Bandai Namco Entertainment Europe, press release, 26 February 2024 (web, secondary): Tekken 8’s first-month sales and Tekken 7’s total. https://en.bandainamcoent.eu/tekken/news/tekken-8-sells-over-2-million-copies-worldwide-the-first-month-after-launch
Chris Kerr, “Tekken boss Katsuhiro Harada is leaving Bandai Namco”, Game Developer, 8 December 2025 (web, secondary). https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/tekken-boss-katsuhiro-harada-is-leaving-bandai-namco