In 1981 Jean Baudrillard gave us a word for the copy that has forgotten it ever had an original: the simulacrum. He meant maps that replace their territory, images that refer only to other images. He did not, as far as I know, mean Tekken — but he should have.
A fighting game is the purest simulacrum machine we ever built for the martial arts. Every move on screen is a copy of something. The question — the one that started this whole project — is a copy of what?
Because sometimes the answer is: a real technique, faithfully. And sometimes the answer is: nothing at all.
The four orders of a punch#
Baudrillard laid out how an image decays away from its original in stages. Run a fighting-game movelist through those stages and it sorts itself with almost unfair neatness:
The faithful copy. Reina’s ebi-geri in Tekken 8 is really ebi-geri — the “shrimp kick” from Taido, body curled head-to-heel exactly as the 1965 textbook describes. Bandai Namco didn’t approximate it; they used the actual Taido vocabulary, down to move names lifted from the founder’s own writing. The copy points straight back at the original. This is the real thing wearing a costume.
The plausible fiction. Then there are moves that look like technique — they obey physics, a trained body could throw them — but they descend from no lineage at all. A copy with no original, pretending there was one. Not fake, exactly. Just… unfathered.
The pure simulacrum. And then there is Clairvoyant Fatal Violet, which connects at a distance of four metres with no contact. No body can do it. It copies nothing. It refers only to the game’s own logic — damage, hitboxes, spectacle. This is Baudrillard’s final stage: the image with no relation to any reality, its own perfect object. The martial simulacrum, complete.
Three orders — lineage · animation · cut — and the whole art of the thing is learning to tell which one you’re looking at.
The surprise that made it a project#
I didn’t set out to theorise. I set out to check. I took three characters and cross-examined them against the primary sources on my own shelf — the Taido Kyohan, the Bagua manuals, Capoeira 100 — expecting to catch a games company faking it.
Instead I kept getting surprised:
- Reina is Taido, verified — the game even implements the real footwork system, not just the kicks.
- Xiaoyu is real Baguazhang strategy — 避正打斜, “avoid the straight line, strike the oblique,” is her entire design, not decoration.
- Eddy has a documented capoeira takedown — the vingativa — that most capoeiristas never actually drill, sitting there in a book I already owned.
The copies were often more faithful than the people who play them realise. And the fakes were faithful in a different way — faithful to spectacle. Somewhere in between runs a line, and nobody had drawn it with receipts.
The idea: draw the line, with sources#
Martial Simulacra is the reference that tells the real technique from its copy — one move at a time, each with a citation and a human-executable demonstration.
Two commitments make it more than another “Top 10 Moves IRL” listicle:
It’s organised by art, not by game. A karate practitioner shouldn’t get “the Tekken list.” They should get every karate technique any game has ever borrowed — Lidia’s, Ryu’s, all of them — stacked against the one real move underneath. Each new game doesn’t start a new list; it enriches the technique already there. The games are sightings. The art is the subject.
It shows its work. Every entry carries a primary source and an honest verdict — including the cuts. We threw Clairvoyant Fatal Violet out on principle: the windup is a real, throwable motion, but damage at four metres with no contact is exactly the line real martial arts don’t cross, and a reference that won’t correct its own sources is just a scripture with footnotes. The honesty is the product. Anyone can be impressed by a video game. The value is in being unimpressed, correctly.
Where it goes#
It starts with Karate — best-documented, cleanest to verify, and Tekken’s Lidia is a tidy first subject. Then it aims at the game almost nobody remembers was built for exactly this: Virtua Fighter, where every fighter is a real, named, documented style — Bajiquan, praying-mantis, drunken boxing, aiki-jūjutsu — the single richest vein of faithful copies in the medium. Mortal Kombat, all fantasy and fire, comes last if at all: it’s the honey, not the meat.
I’ve written a full V1 design doc — the data model, the pipeline, the honest risks (the legal ones especially), and everything I’m still sleeping on. It’s a draft, shared building-in-public. Codename in there is still “Ground Truth”; this post gave it the better name.
The point was never the games. The games are just where the real thing got copied often enough, and badly enough, that the copies became visible — and once you can see the copy, you can see the original it was reaching for. Strip the spectacle away and what’s left is the technique: the territory the map forgot it was drawn from.
Baudrillard thought the simulacrum wins — that eventually the copy is all there is. In martial arts he’s wrong, and the proof is simple: you can throw the real one, and it hurts. The simulacrum can’t hit you from four metres. Only the original ever could.
— David Kwok Ho Chan, with AI Sifu Claude