It Can Take Up to 18 Months to Make a New Tekken Character

Christopher Dring, who you might know as one of the more seasoned and respectable journalists in the sphere of game industry news, recently had a chance to sit down and talk to Tekken developers at Evo France. Names the game's executive director Katsuhiro Harada, game director Kouhei Ikeda, and producer Michael Murray. I strongly suggest you check out the full version at TheGameBusiness website, which includes the video version.

However, we would also like to take a look at some of the major things that can be learned from this interview. First and foremost, there is a big quote that served as a biting title for the whole interview, with Harada saying that maybe he is a failure as a producer. The important context here is down to how Harada and Tekken team approach making new characters. Even if new character concepts mostly pop up from a desire to produce something new, they still feel a sense of responsibility to the game's global community. That's why they go out of their way to explore different countries and take in their culture and language, which is then infused into those characters.

It's easier for established characters, like Armor King, who could be finished in 6-8 months, while a new character like Miary Zo can take from a year to 18 months. As Harada started to wear many new hats, budget became more of a concern, but unlike many of his colleagues at Bandai Namco, he first and foremost thinks of budget in a sense of "what needs to be in the game," rather than trying to optimize and streamline the development to use budget as minimally as possible. That's why, as a producer, he might be a "failure." Even though fans will certainly see this the other way. It might cost more, but they want to make people happy when they see themselves and their culture represented in new characters. They also seem to really hate the clueless experts who speak without knowledge to back it up, and not wanting to fall into the same category, they make sure that they do a good job of researching the different countries when making new characters.

From this interview, you get a general idea that many of the people working on Tekken are still deeply connected to the genre and the community. For Harada especially, his initial drive with making Tekken games was to prove that he loves fighting games more than anyone on Earth. He felt like he achieved this when Tekken became massively successful, so these days what powers him up is going to events and seeing all the people who play Tekken. The people he tries his best for.

At the end of the interview, as Dring points out, they all game incredibly human answers to the question "what do you want to do next?". That's not something you hear too often in the context of these interviews, and it's incredibly refreshing. As a community member that became a developer, Ikeda said that he would like to work on a different element of fighting games, and also connect people through fighting games. Murray continues to pursue his passion for Muay Thai, and has been putting in work to promote his mentor's gym. Harada, meanwhile, wants to take things easy. His health is not as good these days, with kidneys losing 30% of their function, so he stopped drinking and puts more effort into a healthy diet. Kidney function is not something that you can recover, so he's putting a lot more care in his well-being.