Update (06/21/2021, 7:34 p.m. ET): Katsuhiro Harada recently clarified the statements he made concerning Tekken X Street Fighter, saying that his intentions were lost in translation despite the English translations coming from his own channel.
Specifically, when the project was described as “stopped” and “dead” by the subtitles, Harada actually said “paused” and “shelved” respectively, nuanced language that indicates work on the game may pick back up in the future.
“We are still hopeful that Tekken X Street Fighter will resume development when the opportunity arises,” Harada explained. “However, such a title cannot be moved just for the convenience of one company in terms of marketing and branding, and it also affects each other’s development resources. For now, we are just waiting for the right opportunity.”
Our original story follows below.
After years of speculation, Tekken series director Katsuhiro Harada has officially closed the book on Tekken X Street Fighter, announcing that work has halted on the highly anticipated crossover via his personal YouTube channel.
“Yeah, development stopped but we got about 30% done,” Harada said during a June 5 livestream that has only just received an English translation.
The segment was brief, but Harada seemed proud of the work the team had done on getting stretchy Street Fighter yogi Dhalsim working in the Tekken engine, as well as the female character models. He also mentioned that the strides his team made in Tekken X Street Fighter development can be seen in Tekken 7’s version of Street Fighter’s Akuma, confirming a common theory among fans that the demonic fighter’s appearance as a guest character was the result of the work being done on the crossover.
Kotaku has contacted Tekken publisher Bandai Namco for more information.
Tekken X Street Fighter was announced in 2010 alongside Capcom’s Street Fighter X Tekken, which eventually launched on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2012. Where the latter transposed Tekken characters into a Street Fighter-like gameplay environment, Tekken X Street Fighter would have done the opposite by giving Street Fighter characters Tekken’s freedom of 3D movement and spacing.
After its reveal, however, Tekken X Street Fighter languished in development hell, with only a few bits of concept art and the occasional, vague update on its progress whenever someone had a chance to pick Harada’s brain about the project. Bandai Namco has released several Tekken games in the 11 years since, including two-on-two fighter Tekken Tag Tournament 2, the free-to-play Tekken Revolution, and Tekken 7, which continues to be a popular title in both official and grassroots fighting game competitions.
“I wish I could have shown you,” Harada added in this month’s broadcast. “I was pretty confident. We wanted to show [concept art] but the project died.”
(h/t Eurogamer)
DISCUSSION
In a different, earlier interview Harada touches upon the fact that they announced it at a slightly different fighting game market than now, and even then they basically had to contend with the fact that them releasing Tekken x Street Fighter would mean canibalizing and splitting their own audiences. Now Netherrealm reliably puts out a game every two years, SF5 and MvC Infinite were generally disappointments which proved that Capcom can’t just put out whatever and Tekken 7 exploded in a way Namco never anticipated, so it’s even harder to make the decision of “yeah let’s go with a game that might kill what’s left of SF5 and decrease T7's momentum”.
It’s a shame, but hopefully they’ll be able to revisit some of that. I hope they’ll just put in Dhalsim and Chun Li as guest fighters in Tekken 8 or as the final batch of DLC, that would be cool.