Katsuhiro Harada, a producer with Namco Bandai who’s been working on the Tekken franchise for 19 years, is reportedly missing. The legendary fighting game developer has been out of the office for a full week at this point, and it sounds as if no one has been able to contact him in order to discover his location.
This comes from his own personal Twitter account, but it isn’t Harada doing the Tweeting. The Tekken Project support team decided to let all of his 37,466 followers know why he hasn’t been around to update his feed in the past week or so.
“This is TEKKEN Project support team. Mr. Harada has been missing from office since a week ago,” the post reads. “We are still searching for him. Thanks.”
He has more than 12,000 Tweets to his name, but when looking at his feed, you can see that this most recent post is the first from him since May 26. This is very peculiar, and while it be a terrible move by the team if this was just some sort of publicity stunt before E3 occurs next week, we can all only hope that the circumstance preventing Harada from making contact isn’t serious. This isn’t about his games or anything related to the industry as a whole. At this point, we just wish Harada the best as the situation hopefully resolves itself over the next few days. We’ll make sure to update you as we learn more about the Namco director’s situation.