It was delayed half a year as a result
Tekken Director Katsuhiro Harada has been running his “Harada’s Bar” online show for some time now. In it, the game developer sits down with prominent people — often from the fighting game community — to discuss the latest happenings and share insider knowledge.
In the latest episode of the show, Harada sits down with Gamers8 champion Kakeru and fighting game legend Tokido to discuss a variety of things. During the interview, Harada lets a giant secret out of the bag in saying that Tekken 8 originally had the same release date as another fighting title that is very, very likely Street Fighter 6.
During the latter portion of the show, Tokido is given the opportunity to ask Harada a question. With this taking place shortly after Evo 2023 and Gamers8 in August, Tekken 8’s official release date had just been unveiled for the first time.
Tokido asks Harada what he is currently working on, and before he answers the question Harada takes the chance to reveal something very interesting about the game’s release date.
“Before I tell you about that… the release date is on January 26th, right?” Harada begins. “I’m not gonna say what title it is, but we found out about it 2 years ago… That title’s release date happened to be the same as Tekken 8.”
After finding out that the release date for “that title” was the same as Tekken 8’s, the team at Bandai Namco had to try and figure out what they can and should do in this situation. Ultimately, they decided to delay the release of Tekken 8 by “half a year.”
Based on what Harada said, Tokido quickly starts to connect the dots and asks if the other title was indeed a fighting game to confirm. Harada clarifies that it was a game from the same genre as Tekken 8, and if you’ve been following fighting games lately, then you know there was only one major fighting game released during that window of time — Capcom’s own Street Fighter 6.
Harada explains that neither company really benefits from having their games from the same genre released at the same time. He goes on to say that though companies who make games within the same genre don’t get along much, that sometimes an intuition kicks in that caused them to communicate and share their respective release dates with one another.
“And we decided to inform each other about the release date,” Harada explained. “Then we found out the release date was on the same day.”
Harada continues by saying that he informed their director and CEO about the issue within 2 weeks of learning about it. While the company could have spent a ton of money on marketing to try and maintain the release date, they eventually decided it wouldn’t be worth it and it would be better to delay Tekken 8’s launch instead.
The Tekken team still had a lot to do on the development front for Tekken 8 at that time, and Harada says that it felt like they needed to delay the release date anyway. The unintended overlap actually proved to be beneficial for Bandai Namco as it bought the development team more time to spend on creating the game.