Tekken
Four buttons, one per limb, and a family that settles everything with an Iron Fist tournament. Namco's 3D fighter went from the arcade to every PlayStation household, and Tekken 3 — with King, Paul, and a thousand sibling grudge matches — became the fighting game of the late '90s.
Namco's Tekken hit arcades on December 9, 1994, and its big idea was almost embarrassingly simple: instead of buttons for weak and strong attacks, it assigned one button to each of the fighter's four limbs — left punch, right punch, left kick, right kick. Your hands understood it immediately. The 1995 PlayStation port helped establish Sony's new console as the place fighting games lived, and Tekken 2 followed the same arcade-to-living-room path, reaching the PlayStation in 1996.
The story holding it together was pure soap opera with uppercuts: the King of Iron Fist Tournament, staged by the Mishima family — ruthless patriarch Heihachi and his son Kazuya, a clan whose main pastime is trying to destroy one another. Around the family feud orbited one of gaming's great weirdo rosters: King, the luchador with a jaguar head; Paul Phoenix, the flat-topped hothead; Yoshimitsu, a robotic-armed space ninja. Everyone had a favorite, and everyone's little brother had a cheap move.
Tekken 3 was the peak. It arrived in arcades in 1997 and on PlayStation in 1998, introduced Jin Kazama, and was received as an all-timer — averaging 96% at the review aggregator GameRankings and still routinely ranked among the greatest fighting games ever made. It sold 8.36 million copies, and for a couple of years the sound of its character-select screen was the sound of every sleepover with a PlayStation in the room.
The franchise never stopped — by 2017 it had sold 44 million copies across the series, and the Mishima feud is still running today — but the '90s arcade-and-PS1 stretch is the era the memory lives in: memorizing juggle combos from a photocopied move list, and losing to someone who only ever mashed kick.
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