Back at Comic-Con 2010, Street Fighter producer Yoshinori Ono and Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada announced that the two fighting-game superpowers would be coming to a console near you — twice. While Capcom is busy making Street Fighter X Tekken, Namco is also creating Tekken X Street Fighter — and “they have no say in what we’re making and we have no say in what they’re making,” Ono noted during our recent demo.

While we’ve yet to see anything from Namco’s upcoming fighter firsthand, Street Fighter X Tekken looks almost exactly as how you would imagine: the Tekken characters largely act as the visiting opponents in the Street Fighter universe.

Instead of traditional one-on-one matches though, Street Fighter X Tekken will be a tag-team–based fighter, and as you’d expect, you can mix and match a slew of characters from either universe. Tagging out in-game is simple and fast, but if one of your characters takes one hit too many and goes down for the count, so does your team. Ono says the inspiration for the tag-team style came from Tekken Tag Tournament, one of his favorite entries in Namco’s long-running fighting series.

To make it easier on Tekken players jumping into the Street Fighter universe for the first time, just four buttons will be used for combat, making moves like juggle combos easier to nail. If you’re more accustomed to Street Fighter controls, the option to mash on six buttons will still be available. Ono says Capcom isn’t looking to replicate every Street Fighter or Tekken combo in the game; instead the team is focusing more on classic combos that are easy to execute and make sense for the included characters. During our hands-on time with the fighter, it was immediately noticeable that stripping the action down to four buttons and an analog stick increased its overall accessibility.

When asked if he thinks there’s still a strong hunger for fighting games, Ono commented that the Tekken series kept the embers of the genre’s fire lit after 1997’s Street Fighter 3, while 2008’s Street Fighter IV came along and dumped a bunch of gasoline on it. As for this dream-come-true mash-up, Ono says it’s like “throwing firecrackers into the fire."