“He looked pretty dead to me,” Harada adds.

I countered that there could always be a way, and in Tekken 4 Heihachi had tried to make himself immortal using Ogre’s blood (he failed). Is he really, truly dead? Does that mean Kazuya is now the main antagonist of the series? “I don’t know how he’s not dead, right?” Murray laughs, referring to his death at the end of Tekken 7 where Kazuya throws Heihachi’s limp body into lava. “Working on Tekken until around 2005 was one of my goals, but to still be here 28 years later is much longer than I ever expected.”Īs the literal grandaddy of the series, it was hard for me to believe that the charismatic Heihachi Mishima was really gone forever. Almost thirty years later, he’s still here helping Tekken stay top of the class. Harada’s manager asked him, ‘how many years do you need to catch up and beat Virtua Fighter?’, to which Harada replied they’d need about a decade. When Harada first started in the early 1990s, he tells us via Murray, his immediate boss said Tekken’s biggest rival was Virtua Fighter, the preeminent 3D fighting game at the time. Related: Tekken 8 Preview: Thrilling Fists Of Fury Tekken might have Guinness World Records for longest running 3D fighting game series and longest running video game storyline, but Harada knows the humble beginnings from which it sprang.

TheGamer sat down with Harada and producer (and interview translator) Michael Murray, for an interview at Bandai Namco’s European HQ, where we got a day’s hands-on with the new game. Armed with a bigger budget than for the previous entry, the series has come a long way, and its executive producer Katsuhiro Harada has been a part of it since the PS1 days. Bandai Namco is pulling out the stops for Tekken 8.

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