Legendary game director and producer Katsuhiro Harada has announced he will be leaving Bandai Namco once 2025 ends. The Osaka-born developer revealed the news via social media, explaining that with Tekken having reached its 30th anniversary earlier in the year, now was the perfect moment to move on.
He is not quite retiring, however, as he stated that he'll be working on other projects, which will be revealed at a later date. True to his charismatic and outgoing personality, Harada confirmed he'll still be appearing at the Tekken World Tour Finals in January 2026 as a special guest, and in true Harada fashion, he'll be performing a 60-minute Tekken-inspired DJ mix edited by himself. The mixtape will be aptly called "TEKKEN: A 30-Year Journey – Harada's Final Mix."
To say Harada was as outspoken and charismatic as he was passionate about Tekken, the FGC, and any other project he worked on would be an understatement. He has been around since the inception of the Tekken back in 1994, providing voice work for iconic characters like Marshall Law and Yoshimitsu. He would then take the helm as game director for Tekken 3 in 1997, which is lauded by many fans as a genre-defining fighting game and, of course, one of the best in the series.
Despite his long resume working for Namco and later Bandai Namco, Harada is also widely known for being incredibly candid online. Perhaps his most iconic moment was when he wore a shirt at Evo 2017 that read: "don't ask me for shit," a phrase which would become synonymous with the legendary game director.
While it's undeniably true that Tekken 8 might not be at a point where fans feel comfortable saying they enjoy the current state of the game and the relationship between Harada and the community suffering as a result, with constant friction coming from both sides, seeing such a cornerstone of the FGC leave, at least momentarily, feels tragic.
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