After preserving the AI ghost of a fan's late brother, Tekken 8 boss says it might be a glimpse of the future where you don't "need an opponent who is human that has the exact same skill level"

(Image credit: Bandai Namco)

After Tekken 8's AI ghost data allowed a fan 🎃of the series to battle the data of their deceased brother, series producer Katsuhiro Harada saw it as a possible "glimpse of🥃 where fighting games are going."

A lot of fighting game fans face the same problem: a lot of times you're too good to play casually but not quite good enough to compete at a high level, and fighting AI just doesn't hit the same way. The ideal scenario is fighting someone locally who is roughly the same skill level as you, but that's hard to do if your area doesn't have a local fighting game community. So you're forced to enter the cesspool of online and deal with either toxicity or terrible connections (or both; shout-outs to 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Super Smash Bros.). But Tekken 8 ꧟took a step to ch🌌ange this with its AI ghost system.

who had passed away shortly after Tekken 8 launched last year with the help of Tekken series producer Katsuhiro Harada.

Harada spoke at GDC 2025, with translation by Michael Murray (who has also worked on the series since Tekken 4). During the panel 'Tekken: Staying Relevant as a 30 Year Old Franchise' – which was attended by GamesRadar+ – Harada spoke about this꧂ interaction. Murray said, "An unforeseen thing that kind of appeared out of this new technology, was also… a person in the community, their brother passed away, and they asked Harada if he could have a copy of the brother's ghost, because it actually felt like he was playing against his brother to help him kind of remember those times."

While it was definitely an emotional experience, this story also stuck out to Harada as an "example of some of the cool stuff that we can achieve with this new technology and maybe a glimpse of whe🎃re fighting games are going." He added, "maybe you don't necessarily need an opponent who is human that has the exact same skill level as you to enjoy the game. There mℱight be some kind of features like this that can provide a better experience overall."

Katsuhiro Harada also recently revealed that he left Namco for a year due to stress caused by the negative reception to Tekken 4.