Tekken team teases new Tekken, may be Tekken 8

Bandai Namco put a pin on Sunday’s Tekken 7 grand finals at Evo 2022 with what appeared to be a teaser for a new project — and for various reasons, we’re going out on a limb here and saying that it will be Tekken 8. I’m not going to arrogantly proclaim I’d eat a shoe if it’s not Tekken 8, but it better be Tekken 8.

Granted, the Tekken team has made no such announcement. What the developer did show was a planned free update for Tekken 7 that promises balance adjustments and new tactics, as well as a return to Amsterdam for next year’s Tekken World Tour grand finals. Then, a short snippet of a CG ending from the original Tekken played, showing Kazuya Mishima throwing his father Heihachi off a cliff. Kazuya then smirks at the camera, which cuts to a much more photorealistic version of the same character, whose smirk now implies something else: A new Tekken project is in development. “Get ready,” Tekken’s announcer says.

And while that new Tekken project could be a stand-alone Tekken Ball game or — as some have theorized, a sort of reboot of the series, given the original Tekken ending Bandai Namco chose to show — a brand-new Tekken, meaning Tekken 8, is certainly due.

The previous game in the franchise, Tekken 7, was first released in 2015, exclusively in arcades, and brought to consoles two years later. Bandai Namco supported its fighting game with four seasons’ worth of new characters and stages, culminating with the release of its apparent final DLC character, Lidia Sobieska, in March 2021. The game was hugely successful: Tekken 7 has sold more than 9 million copies to date, according to series producer Katsuhiro Harada, so a sequel makes a lot of sense.