Tekken holds the Guinness World Record for the longest running continuous storyline in video game history, and it belongs not to a sprawling fantasy RPG but to a fighting game about fathers and sons throwing each other off cliffs and into volcanoes. This deep dive traces the franchise from its accidental origins in 1994, when a Namco team was simply testing whether texture mapping could make 3D character models look human, to its status as a 61 million selling juggernaut and the third best selling fighting game series ever.

We break down the technical breakthroughs that defined the series: running 3D animation at 60 frames per second in the arcade, the System 11 board co-developed with Sony that made the PlayStation port arcade perfect, the four-button limb control system that mapped each button to an arm or leg, Tekken 3's sidestepping, Te ...