Almost every fighting game player’s controller of choice has its own “story,” and that also applies to those who make them too even if we don’t often get to see what they use.
Longtime Tekken Director Katsuhiro Harada recently just revealed what he’s been using as his personal arcade stick for presumably many years that has its own special meaning for the developer.
After reacting to the Olympic sharpshooter who used a custom arcade stick part on her rifle, the fan who pointed it out, Nonimeg, asked Harada about his own controller.
The Bandai Namco boss happily obliged and shared photos of his stick along with some details about it.
Harada says his primary controller is still a Hori Fighting Edge stick that doesn’t look all that unique at first glance.
His lever and buttons appear to be the defaults or something similar with the pure black hardware, and he doesn’t use any special artwork for his case either.
Instead what makes the stick special would be hard to spot without him pointing it out.
The stick’s serial number is 00765, which is significant because Harada says you can read it like Namco if abbreviated.
In Japanese, 7 can be read as nana, 6 as mu and 5 as go, so chop off one of the na’s and you end up with Na-mu-go, which sounds close enough.
My primary controller is a Fighting EDGE.
It has a serial number of 765.
The number “765” can be pronounced (paraphrased) as “NAMCO”, indicating our roots.
The same goes for my car’s license plate number.Photo: pic.twitter.com/Fp7hEcLSEV
— Katsuhiro Harada (@Harada_TEKKEN) August 5, 2024
This is used to represent his / the company’s roots, so Harada or Bamco were probably presented this stick directly by Hori or requested it like that.
He also may have doxed himself a bit by claiming that number is also on his car’s license plate.
What’s interesting as well is this stick is likely around 12 years old because it’s specifically the PlayStation 3 version of the Hori controller that originally came out in 2012.
We went back and checked too, but it’s not the same stick Harada used to face streamer LilyPichu in Tekken 8 at Evo 2024 — so maybe he can blame his loss on controller Johns.
It’s interesting to learn about what the veteran developer uses and part of his reason why, but we’d certainly like to hear the full origin story behind the arcade stick and all of the other unique trinkets hiding in the Bandai Namco office.
Harada also recently reacted to JACK-8’s one-hit KO punch taking out an opponent in the top 8 of a Tekken 8 tournament that you should check out too.