This week sees the launch of TEKKEN Hybrid, exclusively on PlayStation 3.

Created by NAMCO BANDAI Games Inc., the TEKKEN fighting game series is one of the world’s most popular gaming franchises. And TEKKEN Hybrid brings you some of the very best that TEKKEN has to offer, all on the one Blu-Ray disc:

TEKKEN Tag Tournament HD

Originally released on PlayStation 2, TEKKEN Tag Tournament gave players a new kind of freedom with the TEKKEN fighting engine. With the introduction of a partner tag system, you could now set up new combos and play styles with teams rather than individual characters. And now you can experience this PlayStation classic remastered in full HD for PS3, and complete with Trophy support. Pair up in the tag-team arena with the likes of King, Jun and Kazuya Mishima, and unlock the classic TEKKEN Bowl mode in this definite title for the fighting genre.

TEKKEN Tag Tournament 2 Prologue

This is the one everyone’s waiting for – the chance to get hands-on with the future of TEKKEN. TEKKEN Tag Tournament 2 Prologue is a new stand-alone fighting game vignette in TEKKEN’s classic ‘Tag Tournament’ style, based on TEKKEN Tag Tournament 2 which is currently in Japanese arcades. It features four playable characters that appear in the movie TEKKEN Blood Vengeance (see below); Ling Xiaoyu, Alisa Bosconovitch, Devil Jin and Devil Kazuya. Plus TEKKEN Tag Tournament 2 Prologue is playable in 3D and features Trophy support.

TEKKEN Blood Vengeance

Set after the events of TEKKEN 5, this brand new feature length 3D CG movie is a must-see for TEKKEN fans. Digging deeper into the corrupt underbelly of the Mishima Zaibatsu, Ling Xiaoyu and Alisa Bosconovitch uncover dark secrets that could destroy the Mishima family forever, but will they survive long enough to reveal all? Penned by Dai Sato (Cowboy Bebop and Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex) and directed by Yoichi Mouri, the movie was created by Digital Frontier, the animation studio that created the awesome TEKKEN 6 and TEKKEN Tag Tournament 2 CG intros.

Now a word from the man himself, TEKKEN creator and project director Katsuhiro Harada, “”We are very happy to be able to release all of this content on one Blu-Ray disc, and hope that it will be a truly compelling proposition for TEKKEN fans everywhere”.

More from Harada-san to come…. keep an eye on the blog for an upcoming Q&A.

See you all in the arena.

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In a worldwide exclusive, the TEKKEN team have today released the first 7 minutes of much anticipated, feature length 3D CG movie TEKKEN Blood Vengeance exclusively via the TEKKEN channel on YouTube. The screening will run for 7 days, starting today and ending on Thursday 24th November.

TEKKEN Blood Vengeance digs deeper into the corrupt underbelly of the Mishima Zaibatsu, Ling Xiaoyu and Alisa Bosconovitch and uncovers dark secrets that could destroy the Mishima family for ever, but will they survive long enough to reveal all?

“There’s a lot that TEKKEN fans will learn when they watch TEKKEN Blood Vengeance, and I’m excited to give people this sneak preview,” said Katsuhiro Harada, TEKKEN Project Leader at NAMCO BANDAI Games Inc. “The film is a taste of the future for the TEKKEN franchise and I really want you all to watch it!”

The movie footage features the English VO, but if you click on the CC button on the bottom right of the video frame you can access subtitles for French, Italian, German and Spanish, as well as Japanese, Russian, Korean and Chinese.

TEKKEN Blood Vengeance is set to feature on next week’s PS3 release TEKKEN Hybrid. TEKKEN Hybrid comprises three great pieces of TEKKEN content with 3D CG movie TEKKEN Blood Vengeance, the classic TEKKEN Tag Tournament remastered in HD, and an exclusive prologue to TEKKEN Tag Tournament 2 which is currently only available in arcades across Japan and some countries in Asia.

For TEKKEN fans everywhere, TEKKEN Hybrid is an absolute must-have.

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At Captivate last week, CAPCOM unveiled the first batch of playable characters in Street Fighter X Tekken: Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Guile and Abel from Street Fighter and Kazuya, Nina Williams, King, Marduk and Bob from Tekken. Afterwords, Producer Yoshinori Ono spoke how Street Fighter X Tekken came to be. In his words…

“When we [CAPCOM] took that 10 year break between releasing Street Fighter games, I feel that Tekken diligently stoked the fighting game campfire and kept people interested,” explains Yoshinori Ono, producer on Street Fighter X Tekken and one of the most animated game developers I’ve ever met. “With Street Fighter IV we tossed kerosene on that fire and got fans really excited about fighting games again.”

“I was having dinner with the Tekken director [Katsuhiro] Harada-san shortly after Street Fighter IV came out and we got talking about how we could keep that campfire burning,” he continues. “We were half-joking when we first conceived this collaboration, but it did seem like a great idea to both of us and pretty soon we were both saying, ‘you go back to your office and I’ll go back to mine… let’s synchronise watches and convince everyone that we should do this’. Long story short, we’ve got our game coming; they have a similar thing going on over there, and we’ll see what happens.”

Ono-san was speaking at CAPCOM’s Captivate event in Miami, where he unveiled the first batch of playable characters in Street Fighter X Tekken: Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Guile and Abel; and Kazuya, Nina Williams, King, Marduk and Bob from the Street Fighter and Tekken worlds respectively. I have played quite a bit of the game using all characters over the past week. If you’re interested in hearing about that then ask away in the comments, but for now I’ll leave Ono-san to continue the story of how Street Fighter met Tekken…

“Harada-san has zero input on this game and we don’t do an awful lot of communicating. In fact, he has less knowledge of the game than you do right now and he might learn something when he reads this interview.”

“Street Fighter and Tekken have always been different games. Street Fighter is slower paced and a little more deliberate, it’s all about judging the distance between yourself and an opponent and anticipating what they are going to do. It’s not as aggressive as Tekken, which is played at a faster pace, right from the very first punch.”

“What we’ve tried to do here is merge the two so that you retain some of the more thoughtful approach that you associate with Street Fighter, while also getting a taste of that more ‘in your face’ Tekken style. We think we’ve found a way to get the best of both and we’ll just continue fine-tuning so that the final result is a perfect marriage and a unique game in its own right.”

“There was some communication early on and, usually with a collaborative project like this, we would be obliged to buy some Tekken reference materials, but I certainly don’t want to give money to a competitor, so I’ll most likely work out some private deal with Harada-san where we borrow that stuff. I’m not going to tell him exactly why we need it though, that would be showing too much of my hand.”

“But back to the original point, they have no input into our game and we have none into theirs.”

“There are a lot of Tekken characters that are really difficult to get right in this game, but our selection criteria is to pick the most challenging to bring over because it’s more fun for us and I think it will make the game more compelling in the end. One example is Marduk, who is a pretty surprising inclusion. We have some other powerful grapplers in Street Fighter but nobody that moves the way he does. From E3 onwards we’re going to be revealing many more characters and some of them are going to be truly out of left-field.”

“You might be thinking there’s no way we can include certain characters but you could be second-guessing yourself further down the line. The Tekken universe has some supremely weird characters, including animals and even inanimate objects, and that might strike you as contrary to the Street Fighter aesthetic, but then we’ve had a character whose limbs can stretch and people shooting fireballs from their hands, so the addition of an animal wouldn’t be so out of place and it could make the game really interesting.”

“We’re not just throwing a bunch of Tekken characters into Street Fighter and I hope that fans from both sides are going to be attracted to Street Fighter X Tekken.”

“The ideal ending to this story is to have built a common ground, where the best Street Fighter players and the best Tekken players in the world can duke it out. I’d be really happy with that.”

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