Tekken 8 Gamers Are Hungry For A Waffle House Stage, Director Responds
If you're not from the American South, you probably have no idea about Waffle House. A regional chain of casual dining restaurants that opened in 1955, the company now has over 1900 stores in 25 US states. The key features of Waffle House are that the restaurants offer cheaply-priced and quickly-served diner food, and that they are absolutely always open. Waffle House isn't just 24 hours; the diners even attempt to stay open during natural disasters like hurricanes. FEMA uses "whether the Waffle House is open" as an index of disaster severity.
Waffle House has a bit of a reputation among certain corners of the internet for being rather rowdy. This is due to a combination of the fact that it is frequently found in low-income areas, the fact that it is open at all hours for drunks to file in after imbibing, and the reality that there are dozens of viral videos on the internet of people fighting in the parking lots of Waffle House restaurants.
That sounds like the perfect excuse to put a Waffle House stage into a fighting game, and one of the most accessible fighting game creators is the father of Tekken, legendary game developer Katsuhiro Harada. While he is known for being temperamental at times (famously remarking "don't ask me for shit" to the fanbase before the release of Tekken 8), Harada also enjoys engaging with the series' energetic fanbase.
That's probably why a fan, known as Trost (@backendtechdev on Xwitter), replied to a post by Harada asking if the developer would "please add this stage to Tekken 8 please", followed by a string of desperate emoji.
Of course, Harada is a Japanese man, and has probably never even heard of Waffle House before his fans started pestering him to add the franchise to the game as a stage. Without the context of the viral fight videos with the 24-hour diner chain as a backdrop, it's a bizarre request. Naturally, the father of Tekken asked his fans to explain the "basis for the request".
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Tekken was inundated with tweets eagerly explaining the phenomenon and the reason for the request. Just over two hours later, he posted a follow-up message thanking the fanbase for the explanation. However, that doesn't mean a Waffle House stage is coming to Tekken.
As Harada explains, he can't simply put Waffle House in his game because some fans want him to. Indeed, Waffle House is a business of considerable size, and it holds trademarks on its name and likeness. Harada is correct when he says that the decision as to whether he adds such a stage to the game is really down to Waffle House's management, not him.
It's easy to imagine that the owners of the restaurant chain would want to avoid encouraging the impression that its locations are dangerous and violent as well as the people who would select Waffle House as the place to express their violent urges. So saying, it's probably pretty unlikely that an official Waffle House stage in Tekken will come about. However, we might just see a "Pancake Shack" location in a future update...
