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Former Tekken 8 game director reunites with Katsuhiro Harada at SNK's VS Studio

Both Harada and Kohei Ikeda left Bandai Namco around the same time, leaving many to connect the dots...
Ben Lyons Senior Editor 19 August 2026

Earlier this year, after three decades with Bandai Namco working on the Tekken series of games, long-time producer Katsuhiro Harada announced his plans to depart the Japanese entertainment giant to move over to SNK and found a new game studio known as VS Studio.

Shortly after this was revealed, Tekken 7 and 8 game director Kohei Ikeda also announced his plans to depart Bandai Namco, with this soon begging the question by many fans about whether a reunion was on the cards.

It turns out this reunion was indeed planned, as in a recent social media post, Ikeda has revealed he has joined VS Studio to continue working alongside Harada on gaming projects.

"I've joined VS STUDIO as the next step in my journey.

"Working on games again with two of my former bosses feels nostalgic in many ways, while at the same time, the excitement of creating something completely new makes every day incredibly fulfilling.

"I'm really looking forward to seeing what we can create together!"

https://x.com/nkt_dreamer/status/2089637245762597198

We still don't yet know what VS Studio is working on, but the name of the company alone matched with these major veteran figures at its helm lead one to reasonably assume more fighting projects are on the horizon. It's unclear when we'll get a firm confirmation on this front, but as the studio has only been founded recently, expect a little while before anything official is shared, especially as the company still seems to be in a recruitment phase.

Senior Editor Ben was a Senior Editor at Gamereactor UK. When he wasn’t writing, editing or filming for Gamereactor, he could usually be found playing an FPS or getting lost in a sprawling RPG.
Full profile Gamereactor author since October 2020 · 18,577 published articles
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