Get ready.
An incredibly brief teaser shown during EVO 2022 hinted at a new Tekken game. During the fighting game championship, a clip showed the infamous Kazuya ending of the original Tekken in which he gets revenge on his father Heihachi by dropping him off a cliff. Instead of ending when the camera zooms in on his smile, there's a blur of static and his face is replaced by an older, scarred version of Kazuya with the red eye he gained in Tekken 4. "GET READY", it says.
A video less than 30 seconds long isn't much to go on, but rumors of both a remake of the original Tekken and a new sequel have been circulating for a while. Given that the teaser shows an older version of Kazuya, it's fair to assume Bandai Namco aren't hinting at a remake.
The next #TEKKEN was very briefly teased at #Evo2022. Get ready! pic.twitter.com/B8KwPvWuaIAugust 8, 2022
Tekken 8 appeared in last year's Nvidia leak, in which a web developer found a database of games in Nvidia's GeForce Now client including some that had yet to be announced. Guess we've got another one to add to the list of confirmed games from that leak, alongside GTA: The Trilogy, PC ports of God of War and Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Street Fighter 6, and all the rest.
Back in 2017, when Tekken 7 was announced for PC (the first in the series to be ported to our platform of choice), we spoke to series director Katsuhiro Harada. When asked whether the plan was for Tekken 7 to become a continually updated live-service platform, or if Tekken 8 was inevitable, Harada replied, "if the game is released and the players really seem to like 7 and want to see more in the same vein, perhaps that’s something that could happen. Or it could be that we release the game and at some point decide to change a lot of the game so much so that it warrants an 8 or a number change. We have some early ideas for what we'd like to do, but it really comes down to the players and what they want to see."
Tekken: Bloodline, an anime-styled adaptation of the series which seems to mainly be based on the plot of Tekken 3, is being released on Netflix this month. It'll follow Jin Kazama, Kazuya's son, training with his grandfather Heihachi as he seeks revenge against the ancient demon Ogre. It's due on August 18.
