Ikeda joins Katsuhiro Harada at VS Studio: Tekken veterans reunite

On August 18, Kohei “Nakatsu” Ikeda, former Game Director of Tekken 7 and Tekken 8, announced that he had joined VS Studio, the new game development studio founded by Katsuhiro Harada.

The move comes just over two months after Ikeda left Bandai Namco Studios on June 1, 2026, bringing an end to a career of roughly two decades at the company. Now, he is once again working alongside two familiar figures from his past: Katsuhiro Harada and Yuichi Yonemori, both long-time Tekken veterans.

Ikeda’s exact role at VS Studio has yet to be revealed, and neither the studio nor SNK has announced the project currently in development.

Still, Ikeda has already confirmed one particularly interesting detail: they are creating something new.

In his announcement, Ikeda shared a photograph with Harada and Yonemori and described working on games again with two of his former bosses as nostalgic, while also highlighting the excitement of building something completely new.

And that makes VS Studio increasingly difficult for fighting game fans to ignore.

What is VS Studio?

To understand why Ikeda joining the company has attracted so much attention, we need to go back a few months.

VS Studio SNK Co., Ltd. was officially established on May 1, 2026, as a new game development studio founded by Katsuhiro Harada. SNK invested in the company, supported its launch and announced plans to bring it into the group as a consolidated subsidiary, with the two companies collaborating on game development.

Harada serves as Representative Director and CEO.

The studio’s name is also more meaningful than it might initially appear.

According to Harada, “VS” refers partly to the team’s roots in Namco’s former Video game Soft / VS Development Division, while also evoking “Versus” and several other ideas connected to innovation and challenging established conventions.

Its philosophy is summed up by the phrase “Beyond tradition, crafted to perfection.”

The stated ambition is to bring together technology, creative sensibility and international expertise in an environment designed to produce new ideas and memorable games.

And this is where things become particularly interesting for Tekken fans.

Harada, Yonemori and now Ikeda

With Ikeda joining VS Studio, three developers closely connected to the modern history of Tekken are now working under the same roof again.

Katsuhiro Harada spent more than three decades working on the franchise and eventually became by far its most recognisable developer and public figure.

Yuichi Yonemori has similarly deep roots in the series, with credits stretching back to the era of Tekken Tag Tournament and experience across design and directing roles.

Then there is Kohei Ikeda.

After roughly twenty years at Bandai Namco Studios, Ikeda became one of the central developers behind the franchise’s most recent generation. He served as Game Director on Tekken 7, and as Development Producer and Game Director on Tekken 8. Bandai Namco itself described Harada and Ikeda as two figures who had worked together at the heart of the Tekken Project.

Three veterans who, until relatively recently, belonged to the same broader development environment are therefore together once more. Only this time, there is no Tekken waiting for them.

They have a blank page, and that may be the most interesting part of the entire story.

What is VS Studio actually making?

For now, the answer is simple:

We don’t know.

VS Studio has not officially revealed its first game. There has been no confirmation of a new IP, no announced fighting game and no indication of what genre the project belongs to.

So treating its first title as “Harada’s new fighting game” would be premature, but ignoring the backgrounds of the people being assembled at the studio would be equally difficult.

Harada, Yonemori and Ikeda represent decades of combined experience in game development, with an especially strong connection to 3D fighting games and Tekken’s combat design.

And they are not the only experienced developers making the transition: VS Studio is gradually bringing together people with extensive backgrounds in development, combat systems and balancing, the kind of expertise accumulated over years of working on one of the defining franchises of the 3D fighting genre.

That does not prove what VS Studio is making, of course, but it does make one possibility particularly fascinating.

Could SNK be preparing its own 3D fighting game?

SNK already owns some of the most important names in fighting game history, from Fatal Fury to The King of Fighters and Samurai Shodown.

What it does not currently have is a major modern franchise competing directly in the traditional 3D fighting game space occupied by Tekken, Virtua Fighter and Dead or Alive.

Now place a new SNK-backed development studio beside that gap. Then put Katsuhiro Harada at its head.

Add Yuichi Yonemori.

And now add Kohei Ikeda.

None of this is confirmation of anything; and VS Studio could ultimately be working on something entirely different.

But as more Tekken veterans gather around Harada, the possibility of seeing their accumulated experience applied to a completely new 3D fighting game becomes increasingly difficult not to consider.

For the moment, VS Studio’s first project remains a mystery.

The people making it, however, are becoming considerably less mysterious. And that alone gives fighting game fans a very good reason to keep watching.