Tekken's Katsuhiro Harada believes building a Tekken Tag Tournament sequel "something the next generation can decide"

In an interview at Evo 2025, Katsuhiro Harada, the producer and executive game director of the Tekken Project, discussed the prospects of greenlighting Tekken Tag Tournament 3. In the interview, he expressed a fair bit of skepticism about releasing Tekken Tag as a standalone title, given the current competitive nature of the fighting game market with upcoming games like Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, 2XKO, and Invincible VS.

In an interview with Destructoid, Harada, accompanied by Chief Producer and Game Director of Tekken 8 Kohei Ikeda, and Producer Michael Murray, who served as a translator, candidly mentioned the hurdles in developing another Tekken Tag Tournament installment. 

Harada stated that there are numerous tag-team fighters in the market, and given the lengthy development cycle for a Tekken game, it seems counterproductive to shift their focus from Tekken 8’s ongoing content updates and patches. 

Harada stated:

“It’s quite difficult because, you know, Tag is something I’ve always thought of more recently, and I feel like it should be some kind of mode within a Tekken 9 or 8 or whatever you want to call it.”

When further questioned about whether the Tekken Project was abandoning the idea of a standalone Tekken Tag 3 title, Harada explained:

“If we start now to make a Tekken Tag Tournament 3 by the time that they’re no longer popular, that’s when Tag Three would come out. We have so many more moves than a typical 2D fighter.

So much more work is involved in trying to do that with a 3D game. It’s probably a ways off if it were to happen, and so probably not in my working lifetime. So that’s something that the next generation can decide.”

The Tekken franchise’s rich history also featured spin-off titles like Tekken Tag Tournament, which was released in 1999 as a launch title for the PlayStation 2. The game introduced non-canonical tag-team matches between the events of Tekken 3 and 4.

Later, Tekken Tag Tournament 2 was released in 2011 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and later for the Wii U. The game was praised for its extensive roster of characters from across the mainline Tekken series and overhauled mechanics. 

However, the game only managed to sell 1.5 million units in its lifetime, falling short of Bandai Namco’s expected initial sales figures of 840,000 copies in Europe and Japan by the end of Fall 2012. On the contrary, the mainline Tekken franchise has enjoyed widespread commercial success, shipping 57 million units worldwide as of 2024.