It's a great time for fighting games, with the excellent Street Fighter 6 and the solid Mortal Kombat 1 launching this year. Of course, Tekken 8 is only a couple of months away too, and that appears to be shaping up very nicely indeed. Interestingly, Katsuhiro Harada, aka the face of Tekken, recently noted the game was due out much sooner, but it had to be moved to avoid a certain other fighter.

In his YouTube show Harada's Bar, the director reveals Tekken 8 was planned to release much sooner than its current 26th January 2024 date. As you can see in the above video, Harada won't divulge which title, but it's quite clear he's talking about Street Fighter 6. Apparently, it and Tekken 8 were both targeting a release on 2nd June.

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"We found out about it two years ago... That title's release date happened to be the same as Tekken 8," Harada says. "We were like, 'What should we do?' But there was not much we could do, so we decided to delay our release date by half a year."

He says neither game would benefit from both launching at the same time. Apparently, Harada's team reached out to Capcom and the two companies talked about the release dates for their games. "Same genre companies don't get along that much but sometimes some sort of intuition kicks in," Harada recalls. "And we decided to inform each other about the release date. Then we found out the release date was on the same day."

Harada also admits that the team was thinking of pushing back the game anyway: "We had way too much to do, and felt like we needed to delay the release date anyways," he says. The fact Capcom's fighter was launching at the same time gave Bandai Namco an opportunity to buy some time and continue development on Tekken 8.

A closed beta test for the game is due to start next week on 20th October. Are you excited for this one? Let us know in the comments section below.

Thank you Greatsong1 for the tip.

[source youtu.be]