For 30 years now, the Tekken series has boasted some of the most iconic characters in all of fighting games from Heihachi Mishima and the rest of his family to King and many others, but not all of them could be winners.
To help celebrate the launch of Tekken 8, Thorgi’s Arcade recently released a new video diving deep into the history of cut characters who never actually made it onto the stage.
Going all the way back to the original Tekken, Katsuhiro Harada revealed a handful of design documents and concept art pieces depicting a bunch of their early rejected fighter ideas that, as far as we know, never even got to the point of being made into 3D models.
There was a man from Greenland named Killer Zasunoo who wore a walrus skin, a magical yoga girl based on a Mobile Suit Gundam character, and some more who probably would have gotten Namco in legal hot water.
That includes Emperor Hulk, a doctor / scientist who grows massively in size to fight, and Jean Claw Man Dall, which is an obvious play on Jean-Claude Van Damme.
We were actually the ones who broke this story and translated the information, so you can find even more about these early Tekken 1 characters here.
Tekken hasn’t shied away from animal fighters with inclusions like Roger the kangaroo and Alex the boxing raptor, but Namco had their eyes on others too in the past.
For Tekken 3, there was the idea to make Sake, a salmon that would just flop around the stage, but they obviously didn’t complete him for obvious reasons — though some of his data still remained in the final release.
And Sake almost made it into Tekken Revolution well over a decade later thanks to a fan poll before Eliza won out.
The developers even looked into making a giant praying mantis because they encountered a bug that elongated their fighters and made them look like the insect.
Namco tried to make Zombie Bride a thing not once but twice as recent as Tekken 6, as well as other scrapped ideas like “Sexy Female Tekken Force Character” and others who never even had concept art made (that we know about).
One we did learn in recent years, however, was Darkstalkers’ Morrigan when we translated a post from Harada that stated she was once a prime candidate as a guest character.
Check out almost 30 years of cut Tekken characters below in the fun video from Thorgi’s Arcade.
