Harada's Bar: Tekken in Arcades, Tokido's Retirement Plan, Tekken 4

A new episode of Harada's Bar is out, which means we get a new portion of info about the fighting game industry, and the people within it.

This video opens up with a discussion about the state of arcade games. As you might be aware, Tekken used to be a mainstay at the arcade, and yet, Tekken 8 is the first one to come out on PC first.

With Street Fighter receiving "Type Arcade" cabs, it raised a natural question, will Tekken 8 come to arcades too? The answer to that is way more complicated than you might expect.

With arcades being much less common, it's simply not profitable, and even profits from console versions can't easily be distributed to other departments to create arcade versions. As such, they have to rely on the involvement of other companies that either want to, or agree to create the arcade version.

Another major topic for this episode was Tokido's requirement. Now hold your horses, he's not doing that anytime soon. When the question was raised, he had an incredible answer ready to go – I'll retire when I'm not needed.

Tokido's love for fighting games is deep and unquestionable. Even when he's taking a break from Street Fighter, he's still playing other fighting games. As such, as long as he can actually make some money by doing it professionally, he will continue to do so.

When asked about aging, it seems like it's barely even a factor for him. The only thing he noted is that he can't quite maintain focus for longer sessions, and while it's not a problem for him, some of his older peers tend to complain about the eye strain that can come with long hours spent playing video games.

The remaining major topic for this episode was Tekken 4 and what Harada learned from the game that the majority of players have considered to be too different to be called Tekken.

To summarize, after the overwhelming success of the first three games, Harada wanted to make sure that Tekken 4 is exactly what people wanted. Because of this, they ran a worldwide survey, and many of the responses directly affected the direction that Tekken 4 went in. Even though many remember or look at it fondly these days, such an approach seemingly cemented Harada's vision for the series and given him very valuable experience of handling player feedback.

That's just the short version of it, of course, so I strongly urge you to check out the episode yourselves.