Tekken - On this day

Tekken is a well-known martial arts series in the gaming world today, but did you know that in the beginning it shouldn’t have been called Tekken at all, nor was it tobacco in the beginning? Back in 1993, Namco was internally developing a tool to animate various 3D characters when PlayStation creator Ken Kutaragi came to ask them if they had a game planned for Sony's first console. Namely, Sony then needed an answer to Sega's combat series Virtua Fighter.

Little by little, Namco came up with a fighting game they planned to call Rave War. They promoted the game under that name for a while but eventually opted for a shorter name - Tekken. As was the case with all Tekken, the first part was launched on arcade machines to appear on the first PlayStation 27 years ago today, at least as far as the Japanese market is concerned.

In many respects, Tekken represented a revolution in the genre of martial arts of that time. Unlike other games of a similar type in which different controller keys were used for different attack strengths, Tekken distributed its moves on the keys according to the blows performed on different parts of the body (arms and legs). In performing special moves he also emphasized the rhythmicity of commands.

Technically, Tekken was one of the earliest fighting games in a 3D environment, along with the aforementioned Virtua Fighter. It was also one of the first 3D games to run on the console at 60 frames per second.

Tekken had a rather poor lineup of fighters in today's terms, but it is interesting that almost all of them were well received and appeared in later sequels. Kazuya, Heihachi, Yoshimitsu, King, Nina, Paul, and others were the first participants in the first King of the Iron Fist tournament, which started the saga of the Mishima family, which stretched over the next 20 years, all the way to Tekken 7, and will probably continue in Tekken 8.

As one of the first games for the PlayStation, Tekken quickly became synonymous with the main show on that platform. Not surprisingly, it became the first game in PlayStation history to sell more than a million copies. Later sequels achieved even better results, making Tekken the fifth most successful series on the first PlayStation.

The original Tekken, in addition to the PlayStation 1, also appeared on the PS2 console as part of Tekken 5, which brought the Arcady History mode.