Tekken series game director Katsuhiro Harada shared memories related to Kutaragi on this occasion. According to Harada, Kutaragi often brought barrels of sake to the Namco team to celebrate Tekken’s success. This tradition continues to this day — recently, Kutaragi visited Harada again with a small barrel of sake.
Harada also emphasized that technically Tekken was the first game released on PlayStation hardware, as the architecture of Namco’s System 11 arcade board was based on the same technology in collaboration with Sony.
For Harada, Ken Kutaragi is not only a technological visionary, but also a mentor of sorts. He recalled how Kutaragi shared plans regarding PlayStation 2 and 3 with the Namco team even before their official announcement. Harada was impressed by his philosophy: “The future is always my rival.”
Kutaragi also predicted the era of the internet and network-connected devices back in the 1990s, telling the Namco team that “everything will eventually be connected to the network, even PlayStation.”
Harada described Kutaragi as someone who is always excited about the possibilities of the future, comparing him to a “powerful, dispassionate Heihachi with a science background.”
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Cover author: Eventhubs. Cover source: Eventhubs