Tekken 8: Rebuilding Tekken in Unreal Engine 5 + Tekken's Legacy – IGN First

ign.com:

It’s cold at the recording studio at Bandai Namco’s offices in Irvine, California. Tekken 8 producer Michael Murray and I are mic'd up, waiting for the go-ahead from the production team. We’re talking about the weather in the different places we’ve lived, the two American fighting game majors we’re representing (I’m wearing an EVO shirt; Michael is wearing a Combo Breaker hoodie), and Tekken. Lots and lots and lots of Tekken. We spent most of the prior day playing and talking about Tekken 8, but it’s always a little different doing it in front of a camera, and we wanted to be prepared.

Michael Murray is uniquely qualified to talk Tekken; he joined Namco in 2001 because he loved the series. He started out in localization, which wasn’t really a thing at Namco at the time, and he’s been at the company ever since, working on Tekken the entire time. He started out on Tekken 4, but he also worked on several other games, including Ridge Racer, MotoGP, SoulCalibur II, and Ace Combat 4, among others. After spending several years doing localization, he started going to EVO and other fighting game events, where you might have seen him translate for long-time Tekken executive producer Katsuhiro Harada.

Michael has worn a lot of hats: he started working on Tekken in a design capacity during Tekken 6, and transitioned to it full-time by Tekken Tag Tournament 2, where he had his own mode to design. Michael did some marketing work after the merger with Bandai (while, I might add, still working on the games themselves), and started working as a producer in Tekken 7, a role he still occupies for Tekken 8. He also worked on Tekken: Bloodline, an anime adaptation of Tekken 3 that you might have seen on Netflix. That’s 22 years of Tekken, for