Tekken 3

• 1. Introduction

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  Tekken 3, a fighting game from Namco, sold more than one million copies in Japan on the day it reached the PlayStation. Few games begin their life at home with a number like that. Behind it lies a story that starts in the arcade, runs through a cast almost entirely replaced, and ends with a grandson sprouting black wings over a burning temple.

  Why did a series already two games deep reinvent so much of itself? Who were the fighters who replaced the old guard, and what were they fighting over? And how did a game built for arcade hardware reach living rooms in such numbers that critics were still ranking it among the best ever made years afterward?

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• 2. A Third Axis

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  Every character in Tekken 3 gained the ability to sidestep, slipping into or out of the background of the arena. In the first two games, movement along that depth axis hardly mattered, apart from a few fighters who owned special sidesteps or dodging maneuvers. Now the third dimension had real work to do.

  Jump heights were brought down to more modest levels. A hop could no longer avoid every attack aimed at the ground, and that gave the sidestep its purpose. Players who once leapt away from danger now had to slide around it.

  Tekken 2, released in 1995, had given reversals to only some of its fighters. In the third game the whole cast received them. Recoveries from knockdowns became quicker, and there were more ways to escape tackles and stuns.

  On offense, more moves could now launch a juggle, keeping an opponent in the air for follow-up strikes. The designers also built new combo throws from scratch. All of these tools landed in the hands of a roster that looked very little like the one players remembered.

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• 3. A New Generation

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  Seven fighters survived the nineteen-year jump from Tekken 2: Anna Williams, Heihachi Mishima, JACK-2, Lei Wulong, Nina Williams, Paul Phoenix and Yoshimitsu. Everyone else was new. The arcade version offered 22 playable fighters, and several of the newcomers, including Jin Kazama, Ling Xiaoyu and Bryan Fury, would become staples of the series.

  Jin Kazama was the grandson of Heihachi Mishima and the son of Kazuya Mishima and Jun Kazama. He practiced the martial arts of both his parents and wanted revenge on Ogre, who had supposedly killed his mother. Ling Xiaoyu, a Chinese teenager trained in Baguazhang and Piguaquan, entered the tournament hoping to win enough to build her own amusement park. Her pet and bodyguard, Panda, endured the affection of the current Kuma, who had a crush on her.

  Bryan Fury was an undead cyborg kickboxer sent by the mad scientist Dr. Abel to kidnap a rival, Dr. Bosconovitch. He also had a bad history with Lei Wulong, who had been investigating Bryan's illegal activities back when Bryan was still human.

  Other newcomers carried grudges of their own. Eddy Gordo was a Capoeira prodigy who had been framed and wanted revenge on the Mishima Zaibatsu for murdering his parents and ruining the family business. Hwoarang, a Tae Kwon Do student of Baek Doo San, blamed Ogre for his teacher's apparent murder. Julia Chang set out to rescue her adopted mother, Michelle Chang, from the Mishima Zaibatsu.

  King II fought to save the orphanage of the original King, who had been killed by Ogre, training under the original's friend Armor King. Forest Law, the son of Marshall Law, resembled his father and fought like him. Gun Jack, the third model of the JACK series, was sent by his creator, Jane, to retrieve JACK-2's memory data. Tiger Jackson, meanwhile, was a disco man with an afro.

  The strangest recruit was Mokujin, a wooden dummy said to be 2,000 years old, who came to life when Ogre awoke and could borrow the fighting style of any other combatant. Ogre himself was an immortal alien bioweapon known as the God of Fighting. He had two playable forms: the green humanoid Ancient Ogre and the dark monster True Ogre. The reason he mattered so much lay in the disappearances that opened the story.

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• 4. The Hunt for Ogre

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  Fifteen years after the second King of the Iron Fist Tournament, Heihachi Mishima had built the Tekken Force, a paramilitary organization sworn to protect the Mishima Zaibatsu. Its soldiers were sent to search an ancient temple in Mexico, officially as part of an excavation project. They were wiped out by Ogre. Heihachi had only a brief glimpse of the creature before it vanished, and he resolved to capture it and take its fighting power for himself. Meanwhile, martial artists across the world were being killed, attacked or made to disappear, and Nina Williams woke from Dr. Bosconovitch's cold-sleep machine.

  On the island of Yakushima, Jun Kazama lived quietly with her young son Jin, whose father was Heihachi's son Kazuya. When Jun sensed Ogre approaching, she told Jin to seek out Heihachi if anything happened. Some time after Jin turned 15, Ogre attacked. Jin fought against his mother's wishes and was knocked unconscious. He woke to find the ground around his home scorched and his mother missing, most likely dead.

  In his grief, Jin was confronted by the Devil, which branded his left arm and possessed him. He went to Heihachi and begged for training strong enough to face Ogre. Heihachi agreed and sent him to Mishima High School. There Jin met a classmate named Ling Xiaoyu and her pet Panda. He also fought Hwoarang in a street fight that ended in a draw and started a lasting rivalry.

  Four years later, on Jin's 19th birthday, Heihachi announced the King of Iron Fist Tournament 3. Jin had mastered Mishima karate and prepared to fight. He did not know that his grandfather was treating him, Xiaoyu, Hwoarang and the other entrants as bait to draw Ogre into the open.

  Nina, still suffering amnesia, had been taken over by Ogre and moved like a machine with one order: kill Jin. Jin defeated her and broke the hold. He then edged out Hwoarang after a fight lasting hours, an echo of the long duel between his father Kazuya and Paul Phoenix in the first tournament.

  Paul fought his way to the finals, beating Kuma and Jin along the way. He entered a vast temple, defeated Ogre and walked out believing he had won. He was wrong. Heihachi had tried to capture the unconscious Ogre and instead fed him his own fighting force, and Ogre rose again as True Ogre.

  Officials reinstated Jin in Paul's place, and Jin destroyed True Ogre, avenging his mother. His victory lasted moments. A squad of the Tekken Force, led by Heihachi, opened fire, and Heihachi himself fired the shot into his grandson's head.

  But Jin carried half of the Devil's spirit. It revived him, and the reawakened Jin, now under the Devil's control, cut down the soldiers and threw Heihachi through the temple wall. Black feathered wings unfolded from his back and he flew into the night. Heihachi, alive on the ground, watched in despair as he understood that Jin had inherited the Devil Gene from Kazuya.

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• 5. Big Beat and Motion Capture

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  Namco System 12 hardware made its debut with Tekken 3, after the first two games had run on System 11. The fighters' animation was created with motion capture. The developers also made a deliberate cut: the sub-bosses of the first two games were dropped, because the team believed the game would be deeper if its effort went into the move sets and playability of the core characters.

  The music came from Nobuyoshi Sano and Keiichi Okabe, with Sano serving as sound director. Sano chose a big beat sound at a slower tempo than earlier Tekken tracks, a style not yet used in video games. Game director Katsuhiro Harada did not at first understand the idea, but Sano talked him into it.

  The project had its tensions. One tester complained about the music and wanted something closer to Sega's Virtua Fighter, which angered Sano, though the report was dismissed. Okabe fell ill while the soundtrack was in production.

  A limited release in Japan came on the 28th of November 1996. The wide international launch followed in March 1997, reaching North America on the 18th of March 1997. Then came the harder question of how to fit a System 12 game onto a home console.

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• 6. Squeezing Into a PlayStation

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  Eight months was the time it took to bring Tekken 3 to the PlayStation, noticeably longer than the conversions of the first two games. Those earlier titles had been designed for System 11, which was itself based on PlayStation technology. System 12 was a harder target. The conversion team was largely the same group that had handled both versions of Tekken and Tekken 2.

  Namco representatives had once said they did not think the conversion was possible. By April 1997, with the game popular in arcades, a PlayStation version was considered certain, while a Nintendo 64 version was merely a controversial idea.

  The PlayStation hardware had less video RAM and a lower clock speed, so the visuals took a hit. Backgrounds were rebuilt as 2D panoramic images and each character used slightly fewer polygons. Sound effects played at a high pitch, and the game ran at a lower resolution.

  In return, the home version gained content. Two hidden characters appeared: Gon, a guest from the manga of the same name, and Dr. Bosconovitch. In early 1998 Namco said Gon would be included, but Bosconovitch was still uncertain, making him a late addition. Anna Williams, who had been a palette swap of Nina in the arcade, became a separate character with her own select spot, voice, attacks and ending. Only 10 characters were available from the start, and the rest had to be unlocked.

  There were also two new modes. Tekken Force sent the player through side-scrolling stages against waves of enemies. Tekken Ball resembled beach volleyball, with players smashing the ball with powerful attacks to hurt the opponent, or causing penalty damage if the ball fell on the opponent's side. Tekken 4 later expanded the Force idea in its own minigame, and Tekken 5 succeeded it with the Devil Within campaign.

  Sano and Okabe returned to arrange much of the arcade soundtrack and add new tracks. Additional music came from Hiroyuki Kawada, Minamo Takahashi, Yuu Miyake, Yoshie Arakawa and Hideki Tobeta. Arakawa had composed for the first two Tekken games, while Sano, Okabe and Miyake would work on later entries including Tekken Tag Tournament.

  To promote the release, Namco sponsored tournaments in Japan and the United States. The Japanese and American champions met in a final at E3 1998.

  The game kept finding new homes. The arcade version was included in Tekken 5 on the PlayStation 2. The PlayStation version was one of 20 games on Sony's PlayStation Classic, released on the 3rd of December 2018. It was added to PS Plus and PlayStation Network on the 21st of October 2025, for the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.

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• 7. The Sales Race

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  On the 15th of April 1997, the trade paper Game Machine listed Tekken 3 as the most successful arcade game of the month in Japan. It went on to be the highest-grossing arcade circuit board game of 1997 in Japan and the second-highest overall, behind Sega's rival Virtua Fighter 3 from 1996. Worldwide, it sold 35,000 arcade units in 1997: 15,000 in Japan and 20,000 overseas.

  Virtua Fighter 3 did better at home in Japan, but Tekken 3 did better around the world. In 1998 it became the highest-grossing arcade game of all in Japan, ahead of Virtua Fighter 3 Team Battle.

  On the PlayStation, Sony awarded it a Platinum Prize in May 1998 for sales above 1 million units in Japan. Weekly Famitsu reported that Japan bought 1.13 million units in the first half of 1998, making it the country's third-best-selling game of that period.

  In the United States, PC Data reported 1.11 million copies sold in 1998 alone, earning US$48,500,000. That made it the third-best-selling PlayStation release of the year there. In Germany, the VUD gave it a Gold award in November 1998 for sales above 100,000 units, raising it to Platinum by August 1999 after sales passed 200,000. At the 1999 Milia festival in Cannes it took a Gold prize for European revenues. It grossed a further 57,209,778 euros in Europe during 1999.

  Producer Katsuhiro Harada later put the original PlayStation total at 8.36 million copies, with 1.4 million in Japan and 6.96 million overseas. That made it the fifth best-selling game on the console. Numbers like these only hint at how critics and players reacted.

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• 8. Verdicts and Rankings

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  A score of 96 out of 100 on Metacritic, which ranks it second on that site's list of the greatest PlayStation games, reflects what reviewers thought. GameRankings, as of April 2011, listed it twelfth among all games, with a 96 percent average.

  On the arcade version, Next Generation judged that it was not quite the artful masterpiece Virtua Fighter 3 was, but was awesome in its own right. GamePro gave it 4.5 out of 5 for graphics and sound and 5.0 for control and fun factor. Electronic Gaming Monthly named it runner-up for Arcade Game of the Year in 1997, behind NFL Blitz.

  That magazine also gave it a 10 from three of its four reviewers, the first 10 in three years. It was the first game to score a 10 after the magazine revised its scale so a game no longer had to be perfect. The previous 10 had gone to Sonic & Knuckles. The lone holdout was the fighting-game specialist Sushi-X, who gave a 9 and said: "no game that rewards newbies for button-mashing will ever be tops in my book."

  GameSpot's Jeff Gerstmann scored it 9.9 out of 10. He felt the PlayStation-exclusive characters could be better and Force mode more engaging, and he praised the sound effects, music and graphics. Next Generation, reviewing the console version, wrote: "There is no better fighting game, on this system or any other."

  The rankings kept coming. Electronic Gaming Monthly listed it among the best games ever in 1997, Game Informer in 1999, Computer and Video Games in 2000, GameFAQs in 2005 and Edge in 2007. In 2009 PlayStation: The Official Magazine called it still widely considered one of the finest fighting games of all time, and Game Informer placed it 177th on its list of the top 200 games. Complex ranked it the fourth best fighting game in 2011.

  Players remembered it just as vividly. The site ArcadeSushi said it was the game you played with friends you did not want as friends anymore. Chris Lyon, who held the Tekken 3 world championship from 1998 to 2003, recalled huge open 3D arenas and massive casts that may have included boxing raptors. In 2015, GamesRadar placed it 59th among the best games of all time.

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