Network testing involved data mining, and using a program called Cheat Engine, it was easy to find out who Bandai Namco’s fighting game would feature at launch.

It popped up on Reddit what was previously published on Tekken’s community Discord servers. Some players could run the Cheat Engine while participating in the Closed Network Test (CNT) of Tekken 8. This program allows you to manipulate your game using scripts (or, for example, we fixed a countdown timer going into the negatives so that there wasn’t a glitch ruining the experience…).

The Cheat Engine helped us discover who Tekken 8 will feature when it launches. This list doesn’t seem complete, as Tekken 2 was the last time Tekken had this many characters, and that was more than twenty-five years ago (the franchise that started in arcades later made its way to PlayStation platforms). It would look incomplete if a fighting game were released today with this many characters.

But let’s look at the list: Paul Phoenix, Marshall Law, King, Hwoarang, Ling Xiaoyu, Jin Kazama, Bryan Fury, Lili, Lars Alexandersson, Claudio Serafino, Nina Williams, Leroy Smith, Kazuya Mishima, Jack-8, Asuka Kazama, Jun Kazama, Yoshimitsu, Shaheen, Raven (Default Type A), Zafine (Default Type A), Steve (Default Type A), Alisa (Default Type A). Yoshimitsu is a crowd favorite: a ninja since the first part of the franchise, he’s undergone a significant change since then, and Bandai Namco hasn’t even confirmed him yet…

Tekken 8’s existence was confirmed by the Japanese company last September during a State of Play broadcast, but it’s been an open secret for quite some time. Katsuhiro Harada, who has been directing the franchise since Tekken 3, has been working on the project for years, and we wonder how much difference there will be between the arcade release and the console (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series), PC (Denuvo) release. For Tekken 7, the gap was two years.

Source: VGC