Katsuhiro Harada surprises me with a question of his own. I’ve spent the last half hour challenging the Tekken development chief to remember the first game’s launch on the original PlayStation over the course of 1995, first in Japan, then in Europe and North America. I’m not used to my interviewees turning the tables on me. I’m meant to be the one asking the questions! But Harada, from behind his trademark sunglasses, has the same curiosity about the much-loved 32-bit generation that I have.
“Do you know how old you were and what you were doing when Virtua Fighter first came out?”
As I often am while playing fighting games, I’m thrown. Sega’s influential Virtua Fighter released in arcades in 1993 before launching on the Saturn a year later. I have a vague memory of playing it round a friend’s house in Streatham, South London, I in the summer of 1995. I was 13 going on 14, I tell Harada, betraying my veteran status.
Harada wants to know if Virtua Fighter was as big in the west as it was in Japan all those years ago. “Did it really take off or not so much?”
I tell him how Virtua Fighter on the Saturn impressed me, but not as much as Tekken on the PlayStation. It was King’s multi-part chain throw that did it for me, in Tekken 2 I think, although my memory is fuzzy. Yes, Tekken 2 round another friend’s house, this time in Dulwich. Or did I see the chain throw first on telly? GamesMaster, or maybe Bad Influence?
Here’s what I do know: I could not believe my eyes. Here was a fighting game character packed with polygons performing complex throws each with a realistic animation, expertly blended as if drawn on-screen with a fountain pen. I felt, watching the chain throw slowly unfold, as if the developers had made sure every limb moved the way it would, should anyone actually try to pull this off in real life. King ends his bone-crunching deconstruction of his hapless opponent with a flourish: the giant swing. There’s no coming back from that.