Tekken 8 doesn’t yet have a release date, but it does have a roster of 17 confirmed fighters, among them King.
Tekken boss confirms iconic fighter King’s strange origin
It’s a 30-year history spanning lucha libre, movies, and fighting games
Owen S. Good is a longtime veteran of video games writing, well known for his coverage of sports and racing games.
King is familiar to Tekken fans as the guy with the leopard head. Now, almost 30 years after his debut, Tekken’s irrepressible creator Katsuhiro Harada confirmed to Polygon that pro wrestler Minoru Suzuki indeed performed the motion capture for the character back in the 1990s.
Moreover, Suzuki — two-time Triple Crown Heavyweight Champion of All Japan Pro Wrestling — even performed all-new moves to flesh out King’s distinctive luchador style for Tekken in 1994. This past April, Polygon’s Patrick Gill and Harada went behind the scenes about King’s origins.
King’s character is drawn from the real-life story of Sergio Gutierrez Benitez, AKA Fray Tormenta (“Friar Storm”), a Catholic priest from Hidalgo, Mexico, who moonlighted as a pro wrestler and inspired Jack Black’s hit sports comedy of 2006, Nacho Libre.
A dozen years before that film, Suzuki, Harada, and Tekken gave us one of the greatest video game cutscenes of all time.
Yes, it’s a lot to process. Just go with it. We eagerly anticipate King’s return when Tekken 8 launches on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. It’s expected sometime in 2024.
