On what date did the original Tekken arcade game release in Japan?

The original Tekken arcade game released in Japan on December 9, 1994.

Namco’s first Tekken began as a 3D character-animation experiment before becoming a fighting game designed to answer Sega’s Virtua Fighter. The project was directed by Seiichi Ishii, who had previously worked on Virtua Fighter, and Namco built the game for its System 11 arcade board, which was based on PlayStation hardware.

That shared hardware made Tekken unusually easy to convert to home consoles. The PlayStation version followed in Japan on March 31, 1995, adding unlockable mid-boss characters, arranged music, and full-motion video. The arcade release therefore predates the PlayStation version by several months.

Players sometimes confuse the December 1994 date with Tekken’s 1995 international rollout or with the Japanese PlayStation launch. The date in this question refers specifically to the first Japanese arcade release. Tekken later became a major PlayStation franchise and helped establish Namco’s long-running 3D fighting-game series.