Katsuhiro Harada, former leader of the Tekken franchise, is finally revealing some details about his next game currently in the works at his independent development house, VS Studio.
Harada famously exited Bandai Namco earlier this year, leaving his decades-long post at the company as Tekken’s guiding force to make his own studio. A subsidiary of SNK, VS Studio has been slowly building its ranks over the last few months, snagging several former members of Tekken’s key development staff.
And while he’s been pretty quiet about what exactly VS Studio is cooking up, he shed some light on its current projects in a September 2026 interview with VideoGamesChronicle, and it’s tentatively looking like good news for fans of his previous games.
When asked if VS Studio’s next game would be a fighting game, or if the development house aims to be a “genre-agnostic” company, Harada had this to say: “What I can say is that there are some members who I have worked with in the past who have joined the company, but this is purely voluntary.
“...the title that we are creating has not been disclosed, but as I said earlier, I don’t want to betray our fans’ expectations. The game that we’re developing will be some kind of surprise, but rest assured, it is not something that is outside of expectations,” he answered.
While this statement doesn’t affirm anything, it does point to the fact that Harada is making something that is at least somewhat in the realm of what fans are expecting — and that, to us, sounds a lot like a fighting game. (It's also worth noting that Harada himself said he wanted to develop a new fighting game in an interview with Den-fami Nico Gamer after the news of VS Studio was first announced.) Whether it’s a totally new IP or a new installment of an existing franchise remains to be seen, but SNK’s chief publishing officer, Ozan Kocoglu, says VS Studio isn’t opposed to both making original titles and expanding on their previous works.
“I think it can be both. I don’t think we should be limited to one road or the other. I think Harada-san can bring a wealth of experience into supporting our existing IPs in growing in a different way, or going to the next stage alongside people like Oda-san. But at the same time, as SNK is growing to become much bigger and a new company, we also need fresh ideas,” he said.
“We also need to build new IP pillars that, you know, he could be working on, so that they can actually enrich the SNK portfolio beyond what we have. I definitely see Harada-san being able to do both, and it will depend on what he wants to do and how, and especially on which IP he could collaborate on with some of our development leads in the future.”
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/former-tekken-director-katsuhiro-harada-says-his-next-game-will-be-a-surprise-but-not-outside-fans-expectations
