Harada clarifies Tekken X Street Fighter’s status, saying it isn’t dead yet

Tekken series lead Katsuhiro Harada has clarified a statement he made this weekend that suggested Tekken X Street Fighter had been cancelled.

In the latest episode of video talk show Harada’s Bar, Harada appears to state that the game has been scrapped.

“Development stopped but we got about 30 percent done,” the video’s English subtitles say. Later, when discussing concept art, the subtitles state that Harada said: “We wanted to show it, but the project died.”

Harada has now tweeted a thread explaining that the English subtitles – which were created by Harada’s team and added to the video itself, rather than auto-generated by YouTube – were translated wrongly, and that the project hasn’t been cancelled at all.

In his statement, Harada explains that the phrase he used when discussing the game’s development translates more to ‘it’s pending state’ or ‘paused’, rather than ‘stopped’.

As such, when the subtitle stated that “development stopped but we got about 30 percent done”, it should have read: “Up to 30% of the development was in progress but now it is still pending.”

Similarly, Harada explains that he used the phrase ‘okura-iri’ which was translated to “the project died” in the subtitles, but that the original meaning of the phrase is ‘shelved’ or ‘put in storage’.

“We are still hopeful that Tekken X Street Fighter will resume development when the opportunity arises,” Harada explains in his statement.

“However, such a title cannot be moved just for the convenience of one company in terms of marketing and branding, and it also affects each other’s development resources. For now, we are just waiting for the right opportunity.”

The crossover fighting game was announced 11 years ago at the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con, along with Capcom’s Street Fighter X Tekken, which was released in 2012.

Harada told VGC in 2019 that the continued post-release success of Tekken 7 made it “harder to justify” releasing new entries in the series such as Tekken X Street Fighter.

“Traditionally, the life cycle of a fighting game is very short – maybe one or two years and then you make a sequel,” the designer and producer said.

“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.”