In 2010, Bandai Namco and Capcom announced a pair of crossover fighting games. Capcom's half of that agreement, Street Fighter X Tekken, shipped in 2012. But Bandai Namco's half, Tekken X Street Fighter, went quiet shortly after the announcement. At this point, due to the silence, news stories tend to pop up whenever Harada mentions the game hasn't been cancelled.
"It's very difficult to talk about," he says. "Obviously, I had originally planned to release it much earlier than we're currently looking at."
He says Bandai Namco delayed the game because other fighting games had saturated the market, not because of development trouble, and that it specifically wanted to put some breathing room between the game and Street Fighter X Tekken to avoid player confusion. He says the game is still in development with around 40 people currently working on it (though some of those split their time with Tekken 7), but he also says that "Tekken 7 will be our big thing for the next while."
Asked if Tekken X Street Fighter will be available in the next two years, Harada says he can't commit to that time frame, but he wants to resurface it in a way that will surprise people. "People have been talking about the game for such a long time that they aren't going to be surprised if you just release it normally," he says. He jokes about announcing it by saying, "Hey, you can play it tomorrow," which Bandai Namco did with the free-to-play game Tekken Revolution and Harada says worked well in that case.
"I don't know if that's what we have planned, but we do plan to have some kind of surprise," he says.
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