Games inside games: Tekken Bowl (Tekken Tag Tournament)

Come for the tag team fighting tournament with a mysterious wolf lady antagonist, stay for tag team bowling surrounded by a heavily armed corporate army cheering you on.

This column is “Games inside games,” in which I’ll write about game contained within — and only contained within — another game. No secret playable Wolfenstein inside of a different Wolfenstein here, but original games exclusive to the games they’re contained within. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

The Game

Tekken Tag Tournament is a spin-off of Namco’s mainline Tekken series, with the twist being that you select two characters instead of one, and can switch between them — you know, tag in and out — at any point in the match. Well, not if they’re getting beat down in that very moment, but so long as they’re not actively taking damage or in the middle of being thrown or what have you, then you can press one of the tag buttons and swap.

One thing that sticks out about Tekken Tag Tournament, compared to other fighters with a similar tag-team premise, is that just one character has to be defeated in order for the match to end rather than both. So, you will spend time swapping out an injured character and hoping they can heal some of their temporary damage that would have become permanent if they were hit again in order to stave off defeat, but if you’re caught in a big combo of moves and can’t escape, you might not have time to recover because you’ve already lost. The matches are fast-paced because of this need to watch the meters like this, and still feel very Tekken-like, just with that extra bit of strategy to concern yourself with.

Image credit: MobyGames

Since it’s a spin-off, characters who have been killed in past games or otherwise shouldn’t exist in the same timeline can be found here and even paired together. For example, Kazuya Mishima is back even though the next Tekken entry marked 20 in-universe years since his death by volcano courtesy his dad, and Jin Kazama is running around as an adult in the same game as a young version of his mother, Jun Kazama, even though she canonically went missing when he was still just 15. Have them fight, team them up, do whatever. It doesn’t have to make sense for two key reasons: one, this is a spin-off just meant to be a good time with some different mechanics than the mainline, canon games, and two, Tekken is a series where you can play as a kangaroo named Roger who wears boxing gloves and also knows how to do a hurricanrana.

Tekken Tag Tournament was released in arcades in 1999 as the fourth franchise entry, and then was given a home console release as a launch title for the Playstation 2 in North America the next year. While arcade games would oftentimes run on more powerful hardware than home consoles could provide, the arcade edition of Tekken Tag Tournament ran on the same board as Tekken 3, which was also ported as an original Playstation game: the PS2 release is actually an updated and enhanced edition of Tag Tournament. Tekken 4, when it released in arcades in 2001, ran on the Namco System 246 hardware, which was based on the Playstation 2 hardware, whereas the arcade edition of Tekken Tag Tournament was a 32-bit board that was an upgrade on the co-developed by Namco and Sony System 11 board, which was based on the original Playstation. So it’s no wonder Tekken Tag Tournament received an upgrade prior to home release, to show off what this new hardware could do at launch.

The Game Inside The Game

When you want a break from the various modes in which you can fight for the right to throw your kids or parents into a volcano, you can relax with a little bit of bowling. Tekken bowling, specifically, known as Tekken Bowl. Tekken Tag Tournament marks its first appearance in the series, and comes from an era where developers would put additional game modes into games without then hiding them behind paid DLC transactions. I know, I know, if you’re of a certain age, there’s some come on grandpa, let’s get you to bed to that, but it’s true: you used to have access to everything on the disc without paying to unlock it later.

How to Get Tekken Bowl

Now, Tekken Bowl is already there on the Tekken Tag Tournament disc, yes, and you can play it without having to pay to access it since this is a game from the year 2000, but you do have to work to unlock it. Complete the arcade mode of Tekken Tag Tournament 10 times with any character pairings you want, and you’ll unlock Tekken Bowl. You’ll get there even without trying to do this specifically, since there are also loads of hidden characters you won’t have access to until you unlock them in arcade mode, so you’d be playing this anyway whenever you aren’t fighting a friend. But even if you went in there just to get Tekken Bowl, it’s not a huge lift. And that’s because you don’t need to play on the defaults if you don’t want to: you can set the game to easy and one victory to advance instead of two, then blow through the whole thing in no time to unlock characters and the mode. Or, you can take things slower and enjoy yourself, learning the intricacies of combat and the characters and the strategy to get both a little more naturally. World’s your oyster.

There’s no in-game announcement for unlocking Tekken Bowl (nor is there one for unlocking any of the characters, either), but it’s right there on the main menu with everything else once you do unlock it. It’s not like it’s hidden away deep within some sub-menus or anything, just like how new characters are just there to be used the next time you open the character select screen, like they’ve always been there.

As said before, Tekken Bowl is also available as DLC — in Tekken 7, specifically — and was included in the Playstation Portable re-release of Tekken 5, known as Dark Resurrection. Tekken Tag Tournament also received an HD remaster in the Tekken Hybrid collection for Playstation 3, which changed the aspect ratio to 16:9, included a demo for Tekken Tag Tournament 2, and the film Tekken: Blood Vengeance. The Tekken Bowl included in Tekken Tag Tournament on the PS2 is the original, though.

What is Tekken Bowl?

It’s bowling! Which is both correct and also a deficient response, as it’s a bit like saying that Ridge Racer is racing. I bring up that other Namco franchise for a reason, and it’s because, like Ridge Racer, Tekken Bowl has its own physics to consider. Ridge Racer’s drifting doesn’t make much sense if you use real-world considerations, but it doesn’t have to be analogous to how drifting works in reality. It only has to work, logically, within the game structure itself, and it does! Which is why Ridge Racer is both baffling and amazing. Tekken Bowl has a similar thing going on. The pins, for one, are golden busts of Heihachi Mishima, so why would they move like real bowling pins? They have skinnier bodies and weighted bottoms and a guy’s head and weird pointy hair on top, of course they shouldn’t. They can get caught under the stone above them and wildly spin in place, they can lean in ways bowling pins do not lean, and they won’t strike other pins the way you expect them to, either. And that leaves aside that I’m pretty sure they’re actually just made out of gold, which is why these super powerful fighters don’t always knock every pin down and explode them into a million pieces whenever they hit them with the ball. Which, by the way, looks like a disco ball because why not? “Because why not” is practically Tekken’s guiding principle, and it works.

There are no visual guides on the lane to align your shots — you just have to eyeball it and go. Which is fine, really, because your concern is hitting the timing meters at the right moment so you get the roll you need. The first measures your spin and direction, and is a left-to-right (or right-to-left, if the bowler is left-handed) half-circle pendulum pinballing back and forth at different speeds for different characters. The second is a power meter that moves at the same speed for every bowler, but the actual range of power outputted is different depending on who you choose. And if you overfill it, your character will throw the ball but fail to let go, comically sending themselves flying through all of the pins and committing a foul in the process. The little “Caution” warning you get telling you not to actually attempt to fly through the pins holding the ball in real life really sells the whole thing.

Whichever characters you’ve unlocked in the main game are available to choose in Tekken Bowl as well, which means that yes, you can bowl with a genetically engineered kangaroo named Roger if you want to. Each character has their own handedness, power, and control to consider: Panda, for instance — who is literally a giant panda — can roll the ball over 50 mph because she’s an enormous bear with ridiculous strength — but her control is severely lacking (because she’s an enormous bear with ridiculous strength). Jin Kazama is more well-rounded, able to roll well over 30 mph but with good control of the ball, and then characters like Anna roll slower, but have more control. It’s important to know what your characters can do, not just so you can have an easier time of bowling to your own strengths, but because you need to know who to set into the first slot and who to set in the second. Yes, Tekken Bowl is also tag-team style: the first character rolls the first ball of a frame, the second the second. So, you should place your character more likely to roll a strike in the first slot — maybe for you that’s your more powerful one who can roll faster — and have your second be your control artist, ready to pick up a spare if necessary. So, no Panda in slot two.

It’s surreal to look around the surroundings of the bowling “alley,” which is a single lane. “Mishima Lanes” is inscribed on the stone above the pins. Heavily armed corporate military forces wave their assault rifles around cheering you on and going wild when you manage a strike (which also causes your character to deliver one of their victory poses after a replay). These dangerous combatants, these bloodthirsty committers of patricide and prolicide, these genetic experiments and robot combatants and masked wrestlers and fighters of every discipline from Baguazhang to capoeira with breakdancing… they all lose their minds watching and participating in some bowling. The dream of riches in a fight to the death brought them together, but it’s a shared love for God’s sport that’ll keep them that way.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.