Tekken is no stranger to fashion collabs, so it’s no surprise that the new Tekken 8 x Gentle Monster along with the Nike collab are on the way soon, both in-game and in real life.
During our recent hands-on with Tekken 8, we also got to talk with Tekken 8 producer Michael Murray. Aside from the obvious topics like Heihachi’s return, we also asked Murray about the stories behind the two collabs.
It turns out that these two fashion collabs have interesting stories. Moreover, each of them came about in different ways. To start, the Gentle Monster collab began when the South Korean eyewear brand contacted the team for a potential collection.
Murray explains how the collaboration happened as:
“We’ve done several collaborations with UNIQLO. We also did some with Supreme in the past for Tekken 7. So, there’s a variety of different ways that these collabs come about. In the instance of Gentle Monster, for example, our licensing group was approached by them, and they were interested in doing something with Tekken. We had some staff on our team who were already quite big fans of Gentle Monster, so they knew exactly what the brand was about, and they felt it would be a good match. So then we said cool, let’s do something together.
They came up with the designs that they wanted to do for the actual sunglasses. But then they’re also going to have these activations at their own stores I believe, and so for some of the props and things for their stores and decorations and stuff like that, we suggested a lot of different things to make it look and feel like Tekken. But the design of the product themselves is pretty much done on their side.”
What’s interesting is that Gentle Monster was the one not only to approach the Tekken team, but they also had the design in mind already. For fans of the brand though, this might not be too surprising given that Gentle Monster is no stranger to video game crossovers (think the previous Overwatch 2 collection).
On the flip side, the Nike collab was something that Murray and the game director Kohei Ikeda (aka Nakatsu) have been hoping to do for quite some time now.
“Nike is something that myself and the director Nakatsu had been wanting to do for a long time, said Murray. “We’re both huge sneaker fans and Tekken is famous for Kazuya being a sneakerhead himself. We included a nod to that in the in-game movies when he opens up his closet with all the sneakers on it.
Given this, the team went to Nike for a potential collab, and while they expected it to be a tough process, it was surprisingly smooth sailing as Nike was also interested in Tekken. What’s more, there were even Nike designers who were fans of Tekken, meaning the design process itself was also trouble-free.
Murray had this to say about the Nike collab story:
“So we approached Nike, and we felt it was a really good time for it because we were coming up on the 30th anniversary of Tekken. Also, we had a brand new game that was creating a lot of buzz, and we felt that maybe we had good timing and position to approach Nike and make something happen, because, you know, they’re quite sought after and they don’t necessarily collaborate with anyone.
We knew it was going to be a tough collaboration to make happen, but they were surprisingly enthusiastic from the start. Once we actually started doing the designs, I sat down with them initially and explained what the Tekken lore was about, what our visual cues are, and what our audience is like, and then they took it from there.
“The guy who designed the shoes, it actually turned out that he was a Tekken fan who had been playing for many years with his brothers and his dad. So, the designs that came from him were perfect straight away. They had cues of Kazuya’s clothing, that purple, kind of crocodile-like leather, the little middle accents on the shoes; all of these came from him, and so we had a great synergy in that project.”
Given that Tekken 8 has already cooked up these two major fashion collabs, it won’t be a surprise if we see more in the coming years as the game continues to get more characters and updates.
Tekken 8 Version 1.08 will be released in Fall 2024 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.