For three decades, the Tekken series has brought players together as they control of some of the best fighters in the world. Now, a 92-year-old Japanese woman named Hisako Sakai has carved out her own legend in the King of the Iron Ring battles by winning a Tekken 8 tournament.
As reported by Automaton, the tournament of senior citizen Tekken 8 players was put on by the Japanese eSports association Care. The mission statement of that organization is to “create an environment in which the elderly can casually participate in eSports.” Care has been running tournaments since 2019 while treating them like a major event with livestreaming and official commentators. A video from the event can be seen below.
Sakai made it all the way to the finals while playing as Claudio, when she went up against 74-year-old player Goro Sugiyama, who used Lili as his character. The match between Sakai and Sugiyama can be found two hours and 25 minutes into the video above. Despite the advantage of Sugiyama’s relative youth, Sakai appears to have a superior button-mashing technique and enough mastery of the game to execute an effective path to victory.
Tekken development chief Katsuhiro Harada recently announced his departure from Bandai Namco after three decades with the company. Harada is not retiring from the video game industry, and his farewell message indicated that he has taken into consideration the “time I have left as a creator.”
Earlier this year, Harada expressed his desire to bring the Waffle House chain of restaurants into Tekken. There have been several viral videos of fights in Waffle House restaurants that have given the chain a reputation that it probably wants to shy away from. That may be why Waffle House turned down Harada’s request.