It’s hard to believe now, but Tekken X Street Fighter was announced 11 years ago at the 2010 San Diego Comic Con alongside Capcom’s Street Fighter X Tekken, which would release in 2012 and was actually pretty good. Tekken X Street Fighter, however, never released. We’ve speculated on why in the past, but while Tekken series lead Katsuhiro Harada insisted the game was still in development, it was safe to assume the game was canceled.
And today, we got official confirmation that was the case. “Development stopped but we got about 30 percent done,” Harada said in the latest episode of Harada’s Bar, his video talk show. “We even had motions, which you can see reflected in Akuma.”
“We were working really hard on that, we really were,” Harada added. “Wish we could show you the models and stuff. We had really nice models. I really wanted to show them Chun-Li. I wanted to show you guys all the characters. We were pretty confident.”Harada also said that while he would like to have shown off the models and concept art the team had, it can’t happen without Capcom’s permission.
This isn’t a huge surprise. Harada had previously said that making Tekken X Street Fighter was harder to justify given the success of Tekken 7. “Traditionally, the life cycle of a fighting game is very short – maybe one or two years and then you make a sequel. But Tekken 7 is very successful as a service game with its DLC. That makes it much harder to justify releasing another game, while Tekken 7 is still doing so well.”
It’s a shame that the game will never release, as several people told Harada they were still excited for it when he asked about the game in a Twitter poll in 2019. Officially canceling the game, however, does let fighting game fans move on. Now if we could only get Rockstar to admit that Agent is officially canceled.
Let me be honest. What percentage of you are really waiting for "TEKKEN x Street Fighter"?
— Katsuhiro Harada (@Harada_TEKKEN) December 13, 2019
(My marketing view is that TK7 and SFV are selling very well, so there is no opportunity to drop TK x SF on the market).
