Bandai Namco and the Tekken team made Tekken 8 official on Tuesday, showing first footage of the next-gen fighting game. The first trailer for Tekken 8 debuted during Sony’s State of Play showcase and showed Tekken mainstays Jin Kazama and Kazuya Mishima duking it out, in classic Tekken fashion, but in higher fidelity than ever before.
According to Tekken series producer Katsuhiro Harada, the first trailer for Tekken 8 was “taken directly from a certain part in the current work-in-progress Tekken 8’s story mode, played on PlayStation 5.”
“In other words, all the character models, backgrounds, and effects are the same ones that are used in-game,” Harada explained in a post on Sony’s PlayStation Blog. “Although this was captured from the story mode, it is not a pre-rendered movie made for the trailer but rather real-time rendered footage, running at 60 frames per second, similar to how you would experience the game in versus battle modes. (Of course, some of the effects, dialogue as well as the camera angle is currently being updated and may change when the game launches.)”
A release date for Tekken 8 was not announced. Bandai Namco said simply to “stay tuned” for more information. Despite being announced during a PlayStation livestream, Tekken 8 is not a PS5 exclusive; the fighting game is also coming to Windows PC and Xbox Series X.
Bandai Namco first teased Tekken 8 at this year’s Evo fighting game championship series.
The previous game in the franchise, Tekken 7, was first released in 2015, exclusively in arcades, and brought to consoles two years later. Bandai Namco supported its fighting game with four seasons’ worth of new characters and stages, culminating with the release of its apparent final DLC character, Lidia Sobieska, in March 2021. The game was hugely successful: Tekken 7 has sold more than 9 million copies to date, according to series producer Katsuhiro Harada, so a sequel makes a lot of sense.