Katsuhiro Harada made a surprising revelation about Tekken, and Soul Calibur, on Twitter today.
Harada was responding to a fan who stated that if Soul Calibur had a person as dedicated to it as Harada was to Tekken, it would still be around. Harada then went into a long thread that ended with a surprising revelation.
To quote Harada directly:
“I made the decision to lead the TEKKEN Project despite the fact that I was in a different company, department, and division, and had no budget authority. I practically manipulated the creative and budget planning.”
Harada had also explained in this thread that he was promoted in Bandai Namco, to positions that were supposed to put him out of place managing the Tekken franchise. To paraphrase him this time, Bandai Namco reorganized to separate into a game developer and a publisher. Harada was moved to the publishing side, and became head of Global Business Development.
In spite of the division name, Harada was no longer directly involved in making games, and he was actually working on marketing. We can actually verify these claims in Harada’s Wikipedia page, where it states that he worked at Global Marketing for games like My Hero Academia: One’s Justice, Dark Souls Remastered, and Naruto to Boruto: Shinobi Striker.
As gamers, we should really be thankful to Harada that he was stubborn enough to keep the Tekken franchise going. But clearly, if you were running Bandai Namco and you saw a subordinate do this, they could have been punished or fired for doing so. It’s genuinely stunning that he managed to do this, but it is possible he suffered no consequences because of the success of Tekken 7.
Harada’s thread also goes through other points, and discusses what happened inside Bandai Namco through all these years. Getting back to Soul Calibur, Harada pointed out that the franchise went through several struggles through the years. Harada pointed out that the two fighting games actually had an internal rivalry within the company, and mentions the name of Hiroaki Yotoriyama, who headed Soul Calibur in a very similar way to how Harada headed Tekken. Yotoriyama now works in VR.
We can’t go through every point Harada brought up here, but it’s still a stunning admission from Harada. No doubt, if management had their way, Harada would currently be focused 100 % on marketing for Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, which is being published by Bandai Namco worldwide.
Ultimately, one wonders why Bandai Namco allowed things to get to this situation. Without Harada’s stubbornness, Tekken 7 would not have reemerged as a breakout hit in the fighting game genre. That isn’t exactly lost money from not selling more Elden Ring. That’s even more money they could have passed on, if everyone in the company followed management blindly.
