Tekken

As with many fighting games, players choose a character from a lineup and engage in hand-to-hand combat with an opponent. Traditional fighting games are usually played with buttons which correspond to the strength of the attack, such as strong punch or weak kick. Tekken, however, dedicates a button to each of the four limbs of the fighter. The gameplay system includes blocks, throws, escapes, and ground fighting.

In the original Tekken, players could only block attacks manually. From then on, starting with Tekken 2, characters automatically block while not moving forward or performing actions, a feature called "neutral guard." Standing or retreating characters will block high and middle attacks with no input from the player, while crouching characters will duck high attacks and block low ones. Normal middle attacks will hit crouching players, but some special mid-attacks can be blocked by both stand and crouching neutral guards.

Tekken was not originally conceived as a fighting game. The project began as an internal Namco test case for animating 3D character models, and eventually incorporated texture mapping similar to that found in Namco's 1993 racing game Ridge Racer. Directed by Virtua Fighter designer Seiichi Ishii, Tekken was intended to be a fundamentally similar title, with the addition of detailed textures that were not blocky on the characters like Virtua Fighter 2 and twice the frame rate. It was the first 3D fighting game to use the modern 60 fps standard.

Critical reception to the games has been positive. The series arguably peaked in acclaim with the release of Tekken 3, based on its average of 96% at GameRankings, as well as in Metacritic, and to this day is considered one of the greatest fighting games of all time. Not to be outdone are other frequent candidate games that are all in the main series, namely Tekken 2, Tekken Tag Tournament, Tekken 4, Tekken 5, and Tekken 8.

In 1999, Next Generation listed the Tekken series as number 12 on their "Top 50 Games of All Time", commenting that, "In the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit, Tekken stole the crown from Street Fighter as the king of modern brawlers with addictive fighting in its rawest form."

Since the series has a long history of being exclusive to PlayStation along with the arcade cabinets running on PlayStation hardware, Tekken has been associated closely with the PlayStation brand. Katsuhiro Harada has stated that PlayStation remains the main platform of development for Tekken.

The first game in the series was the first PlayStation game to sell over a million units, which earned it a Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition award in 2008, among other awards including "First Fighting Game To Feature Simulated 3D", and a record for the entire series, "The Best Selling Fighting Series for PlayStation Consoles." Tekken Tag Tournament was one of the most popular launch titles for the PlayStation 2.