Katsuhiro Harada

Katsuhiro Harada (born 1970) is the Japanese director and producer who has been the public face of the Tekken fighting-game franchise for its entire life. He joined Namco in 1994, landed on the very first Tekken before his first year was out, directed a string of its sequels, and rose to general manager at Bandai Namco overseeing fighting games and esports — a run of roughly thirty years that ended when he announced his departure in December 2025.

Trained on our work

In late 2025, an AI-generated video reimagining Tekken as a lost 1990s B-movie went viral, and a fan suggested such clips told the game’s story better than the games themselves. Harada pushed back at length on X: judging only final output without understanding how and why something was made leads to shallow conclusions, and the video only exists because it was trained on the art, cinematics, and story his team spent decades producing. Coverage of his response noted his argument that praising AI for doing a “better job” makes no sense when the material it learned from was taken without permission — while he still acknowledged the technology’s genuinely rapid technical progress and cost efficiency.

Where is Skynet, anyway?

Harada is as scornful of AI hype as he is of AI-generated fan art. In a widely shared March 2025 post, he wrote that as a student he had mentally prepared for AI to evolve and wage war on humanity like in Terminator — only to spend decades watching it underdeliver, joking that today’s AI programs still “freeze up over a full-width space.” His sharpest line was economic: if AI had truly advanced, studios would not be spending tens of billions of yen making games by hand.

Harada’s stance is notable because he is no reflexive technophobe — he has praised AI’s pace of advancement and recalls once telling his comic-artist sister that Photoshop would end hand-drawn images, a prediction he now cites as a caution against shallow techno-certainty in either direction. His objection is specific: generative output that feeds on other people’s work, and hype that outruns what the tools can actually do.