Tekken 8 fans push for Waffle House level, game’s director responds

Fans are pushing for a late-night hot spot to be added to a popular series of video games.

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Gamers have been flooding Bandai Namco boards to have the company add a Waffle House level to Tekken 8, IGN reported.

Tekken is a series of fighting games with a storyline that has sold more than 45 million games and “is the bestselling fighting game franchise of all times,” according to Bandai Namco.

Over the weekend, Katsuhiro Harada, director of the game, responded on X/Twitter, first asking “Why do some communities send me requests for ‘Waffle House’?”

Then Harada, who, according to PC Gamer, started directing the series with Tekken 3, asked for more information, “including the original story, history and background.”

Another X user chimed in, adding context.

“This is where many fist fights in America take place,” the user wrote. “It will make many people angry, because it’s true, which will only sell more copies.”

Several fights at Waffle House have gone viral over the years, including one in which employees got into a fight over washing dishes, and another when an employee deflected a chair thrown at her midfight.

Waffle House was started in 1955, opening over Labor Day weekend in Avondale Estates, Georgia. It has spread to 25 states and 1,900 locations, employing more than 40,000 associates. Every location is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Waffle House is such a part of the American way of life, especially in the southeast, that the federal government has a Waffle House index, an unofficial response metric used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for its disaster response. The term was coined after former FEMA head Craig Fugate said, “If you get there and the Waffle House is closed? That’s really bad,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

It even got the attention of Anthony Bourdain, who said that Waffle House is “an irony free zone where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts; where everybody regardless of race, creed color or degree of inebriation, is welcomed. Its warm yellow glow a beacon of hope and salvation, inviting the hungry the lost the seriously hammered all across the south to come inside,” PC Gamer reported.

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