In case you were holding out hope for the long-gestating Tekken x Street Fighter video game from Bandai Namco, now seems like as good a time as any to stop doing so. During a recent episode of Harada’s Bar on YouTube, the Tekken franchise’s Katsuhiro Harada and Tekken 7 game director Kouhei Ikeda indicated that the project was, in fact, dead. Since the video game was first announced in 2010, Harada has gone on the record multiple times about development having stopped with it being about 30% complete, but it was always framed in a way that indicated that it could be picked back up at some point. Assuming there isn’t missing nuance from the official English subtitles for the video, that time has seemingly passed.
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At roughly 21 minutes and 30 seconds into the Harada’s Bar episode from June 5th, shared later with English subtitles, the pair discuss what state Tekken x Street Fighter was in. The fact that it was 30% complete when put on hold is repeated, and then the two discuss what had actually been done in development. “We even had motions, which you can see reflected in Akuma,” the subtitles read in part. “Dhalsim turned out as well as we expected, pretty good. Female character’s models were really good too, I wish I could have shown you.” The discussion of Tekken x Street Fighter concludes with a seemingly definite line: “We wanted to show it, but the project died.”
“We started the project back in 2012 and the real interesting question then was, what is going to happen when the Tekken team designs characters for Street Fighter? We started creating 3D models and I really liked them – they looked super cool – and the project progressed to about 30% completion,” Harada told VGC back in 2019. “However, when we were ready to progress further with the project, Capcom released Street Fighter V and then we released Tekken 7. Those titles are some of the best fighting games ever and they became very successful.”
As noted above, it would appear that Tekken x Street Fighter is officially dead. You can check out all of our previous coverage of the Tekken franchise right here, and all of our previous coverage of the Street Fighter franchise right here.
What do you think about the comments by Harada and Ikeda? Would you have liked to play Tekken x Street Fighter? Let us know in the comments, or feel free to reach out and hit me up directly over on Twitter at @rollinbishop to talk about all things gaming!
[H/T ResetEra]
