Kangaroo Character Pulled Out of Tekken 7 Roster Due to “Animal Activists”

Tekken by Bandai Namco Games is one of the most popular fighting games in the world, eclipsed only by Street Fighter in terms of popularity. Although they have actually outsold the CAPCOM flagship fighting game worldwide with 44 million in total compared to 35 million as of March 2015. Tekken 7, the latest installment in the series launched in Asian and Australian arcades back in 2015 but will finally be available for the PC as well as PlayStation and XBox consoles on June 2nd, 2017. It will be a faithful arcade-perfect port, utilizing the Unreal Engine 4 graphics but with one missing component: Roger Junior, the boxing Kangaroo character.

In an interview with VG247, Executive Producer Katsushiro Harada explains why this is so: “There was a video of a man’s dog being headlocked by a kangaroo, and he punched it in the face”, Harada says. “It turned into a big problem. People were complaining about him punching a kangaroo. It seems that in the last few years there’s a lot more animal activists – even though they probably wouldn’t play our game they would still hear about that, about a kangaroo in our game being punched, and would complain about it.” He adds that the other animal characters such as Kuma the bear and Panda are still in it because they are “obviously stronger than a human being”.

It is a bit difficult to figure out whether Harada is joking or or not since the interview is in print, but nonetheless, the absence of a boxing Kangaroo in Tekken 7 is hardly going to be missed since there are 38 confirmed characters to choose from with an actual human boxer character named Steve. Hopefully he was just joking because the implication otherwise is that the groups who complain the most are gaining ground and are actually influencing and affecting games even before they come out.