After Mr. Itagaki left Tecmo in 2008, he called me again. At the time, our dynamic hadnt changed much from the previous ten yearsI still perceived our relationship as adversarial. Yet, there he was, calling me once again. He invited me to dinner, where he shared that he had left Tecmo. During the meal, he said something surprising:
Harada, you were my comrade-in-arms.
I realized then that this was how he saw our relationship. He explained his strategies and thoughts from that time in detail, stating explicitly:
I never had any grudge against you, Namco, or Tekken. On the contrary, I respected you all. When I compared the power dynamics in development, sales, and publishing, it was clear that a straightforward approach wouldnt work. I had to employ every strategy I could. Im sorry for everything.
Then, he turned the tables and asked about Tekkensstrategies, particularly in terms of production, branding, and marketing.
I explained many things but emphasized this: Since the 1990s, Ive been visiting arcade venues worldwide to see how players were engaging with my games. I also met with numerous arcade operators and distributors.
Around the late 90s, I quickly noticed the rapid decline of the arcade market in the West (arcades were shutting down at an alarming rate). This signaled that the battleground for fighting games was shifting from arcades to home consoles. More importantly, the value of one play for 100 yen (or 25 cents in the US) was disappearing. The incentive for the winning player to keep playing on a single coin was fading, as was the risk of losing coins for the losing player. This fundamentally changed the value perception of fighting games as a form of entertainment.
Realizing this, we shifted Tekkensstrategy toward establishing fighting games as a viable product for home consoles (As you may know, TEKKEN was ahead of its time in the genre, having developed and released modes like Tekken Ball (which came before DOA Beach Volleyball), belt-action modes such as TEKKEN FORCE, and pre-rendered movies and story campaign modes that went beyond the typical scope of fighting games). In addition to this, I explained to him how I became aware of the emergence of "community events," especially in North America, as arcades began to decline.
At that time, these events were at a grassroots level. They ranged from small gatherings at someones house to tournaments held in university halls or community centers. Over time, they grew into larger tournaments hosted in hotel ballrooms and gymnasiums.
I recognized the potential of these events early on and began providing behind-the-scenes support to those communities. Specifically, we offered free rentals of arcade cabinets and game boards, took care of transport and setup, and occasionally provided small prizes like posters for tournament winners. In fact, many veteran players in their 40s and 50s today may not have known my name or who I was back then, but some might remember seeing me quietly setting up arcade machines at venues (without even wearing sunglasses back then).
During this time, Street Fighter had gone into a decade-long hibernation following Street Fighter III, and the decline of arcades accelerated as gaming markets shifted.
Even as other fighting game series disappeared, I focused on maintaining both an active home console market and a foothold in the Asian arcade market. In fact, the method of constantly releasing new games in the series without a break, and using the huge profits made from arcade boards and in-game purchases to fund the development of console versions, was surprisingly able to continue all the way up to Tekken 7.
This included supporting the grassroots tournament community (the FGC, or Fighting Game Community) to keep our business and development ongoing.
At the time, I can confidently say that very few developers were paying attention to the growing tournament scene in the West. How do I know this? Because during those years, I was often the only Japanese developer on-site, personally delivering cabinets and boards or observing events. While marketing representatives from various companies were present, I rarely saw other developers engaging directly with these communities.
This approach allowed Tekken to continue its numbered releases steadily, even through the "winter" of the arcade market. While the Virtua Fighter series fell silent, we expanded into the Western market and secured a significant share.
I believed that when I faced my own hardships, no one would come to my aid, but the support from an external entitynamely, the core fighting game community in the marketwould be the only thing I could rely on. I told Mr. Itagaki that I had kept this strategy under wrapsneither sharing it with other teams in the company nor discussing it with developers from other companies. I simply worked on it quietly.
Upon hearing this, he was surprised and said,
What? Thats not what a developer is supposed to do! Really? Youre more action-oriented than I expected.
It seemed that he had a stereotypical image of game developers born in the 1970s as people who stayed in their offices, glued to monitors, endlessly coding. To be fair, that was also part of my work, but by the late 1990s, I was using the development downtime between projects to travel around the world.
[[[ Putting an End to the Conflict ]]--
Through this exchange of past strategies, I finally resolved my long-standing feud with Mr. Itagaki. This happened in late 2008.
After that, every year-end, Id receive a drunken phone call from him, which became something of a tradition. (That said, I havent received one in the last few years, come to think of it.)