"Now that we're at the 20th anniversary of Tekken and I've been at the company roughly that number of years — and also, I don't think I've said this publicly before, but I recently had a child — that's kind of changed my perspective on things," says Tekken Series Director Katsuhiro Harada. "I realize that there's not as much time left as you think when you're young, so I'm starting to think that I only have maybe another 20 years working here. And in that time, how many more games do I have left in me to make?"

To many, Harada is the face of the Tekken fighting game series — the one who travels to tournaments, tweets announcements, wears dark glasses, flies through a glass window, competes in a hot dog eating contest, squats over a bed of nails and dresses in lederhosen. Part game developer, part hype man.

In 2015, though, Harada's job extends well beyond Tekken. As a general manager at Bandai Namco, he's currently juggling director, producer and executive producer roles on approximately seven games, ranging from a Pokemon fighting game to a long-delayed crossover and a controversial virtual reality experiment. He also just saw two Smash Bros. games out the door and he's been working up ideas for a new batch of products.

It's a lot of balls to keep in the air. But perhaps that's fitting for someone conscious of the amount of time he has left.

The roster

Sitting down with Polygon, Harada runs through his current project lineup.

First on the list is Tekken 7, the latest in the series that made him famous. He says he's been spending "less and less" time on Tekken recently, because the team working on the series has enough experience to handle it on its own. But he says the team is aiming to make the game more accessible to newcomers compared to previous Tekken titles, and they are tying up a lot of character story threads to bring some closure for the series' 20th anniversary.

Tekken 7

Next is Pokken Tournament, an arcade fighting game using characters from the Pokemon universe. He says the idea came about when Bandai Namco went to meet with Pokemon Company president Tsunekazu Ishihara about licensing music for the Taiko Drum Master music game franchise, and Ishihara surprised them with an idea for a game similar to Tekken. Because Pokken is the first game in a potential new franchise, and because the team has less experience than the Tekken team, Harada says he's spending a lot of time on it at the moment.

Third on his list is Summer Lesson, a virtual reality demo about communicating with a schoolgirl that Harada says ties in with one of his biggest plans for the future.

And fourth is Time Crisis 5, the latest light gun game in the long-running arcade series.

Beyond those four, Harada says he's also working on "a few games that aren't announced." [Note: Following this interview, Harada revealed one of those as Project Treasure, a Wii U four-player co-op action game.]

Which leaves one elephant in the room.

In 2010, Bandai Namco and Capcom announced a pair of crossover fighting games. Capcom's half of that agreement, Street Fighter X Tekken, shipped in 2012. But Bandai Namco's half, Tekken X Street Fighter, went quiet shortly after the announcement. At this point, due to the silence, news stories tend to pop up whenever Harada mentions the game hasn't been cancelled.

"It's very difficult to talk about," he says. "Obviously, I had originally planned to release it much earlier than we're currently looking at."

Tekken X Street Fighter

He says Bandai Namco delayed the game because other fighting games had saturated the market, not because of development trouble, and that it specifically wanted to put some breathing room between the game and Street Fighter X Tekken to avoid player confusion. He says the game is still in development with around 40 people currently working on it (though some of those split their time with Tekken 7), but he also says that "Tekken 7 will be our big thing for the next while."

Asked if Tekken X Street Fighter will be available in the next two years, Harada says he can't commit to that time frame, but he wants to resurface it in a way that will surprise people. "People have been talking about the game for such a long time that they aren't going to be surprised if you just release it normally," he says. He jokes about announcing it by saying, "Hey, you can play it tomorrow," which Bandai Namco did with the free-to-play game Tekken Revolution and Harada says worked well in that case.

"I don't know if that's what we have planned, but we do plan to have some kind of surprise," he says.

Summer Lesson

While describing his workload, the project that seems to excite Harada the most is also the one that's come under the most controversy: virtual reality experiment, Summer Lesson.

Bandai Namco pitches it as a game about communication, but when the project surfaced last year, some in the West thought it seemed inappropriate. The announcement trailer shows the player as a tutor talking to a school girl wearing a short skirt in her bedroom, with camera angles leering at her various body parts and a scene where she covers her body with her hands then bends down to pick up a pencil.

"She is a fantasy for some, and it's for all the wrong reasons," wrote Ron Duwell on the site TechnoBuffalo. "... Virtual reality might be different, but in actual reality, she doesn't just giggle this off and let you continue teaching her in a secluded bedroom. She screams, runs to get her parents and they file all the proper charges against you."

Shortly after announcing the project, Sony and Bandai Namco announced they were pulling it from a planned appearance at the Tokyo Game Show, but Harada says this was a logistical decision rather than a reaction to the criticism. The companies ended up holding a separate event and showing it a couple months months later.

Reacting to the criticism, Harada says, "It wasn't a surprise at all. I've gone to the States quite a bit, so I kind of know what to expect."

In fact, he says he intended for the video to spark controversy. "If you saw the video, a lot of the camera angles weren't presented as the game actually plays. They were a little bit more tailored just for that video, to evoke people's imaginations. So I kind of planned that there would be a response like that from the West because I wanted that attention from the media."

"[The controversy] wasn't a surprise at all ... I wanted that attention from the media."

"It's quite interesting that you mention this, because I feel recently many Japanese people are actually more surprised by Western games," he says. "For example, one game I like a lot, Payday 2, has four people trying to plan a bank robbery, which, to your average Japanese citizen, is crazy to have this kind of crime simulator. Or even just your average war game where your goal is to shoot your enemy in the head to defeat them as quickly as possible. It's something your average Japanese citizen is shocked by."

Taking a step back, Harada explains that he came up for the idea of Summer Lesson with two primary goals in mind. The first was to create something to help Sony show its Project Morpheus virtual reality headset to other studios in Japan. Before Sony had announced Project Morpheus publicly, Harada says, it tried to get developers interested by providing software development kits, but the hardware wasn't getting the same kind of traction in Japan as it was overseas. So Harada approached Sony and offered to make a demo to interest other studios.

Harada's second goal was to use that demo to get attention from both game industry and mainstream media. He explains that, at a big company like Bandai Namco, it's not always easy to convince board members to approve a budget for a new idea like a virtual reality game, but it becomes easier if you can show similar ideas getting attention in the media. And Harada figured that a realistic game starring a schoolgirl would have a better chance.

"When I was brainstorming with what to do with the head-mounted display, obviously ideas came up like Ace Combat where you're flying through the sky, or some kind of science fiction idea where you're in space," he says. "But Oculus had announced its virtual reality plans much earlier, and they had some similar demos and none of them really created any good will in the media. So I thought that, to create the kind of buzz we wanted, the best way to go about it was to create something that's more of a day-to-day experience. And when you think about that interaction with another person — it could be a man or a woman, but if they're the opposite sex, then a lot of people feel this kind of tension if you're close enough.

Summer Lesson

"Not everyone can imagine what it would be like to be at war, to be in space. But they have all, most likely at one point in their life, experienced something similar to that — being that close physically to a person of the opposite sex."

Harada reiterates that the actual game behind Summer Lesson is more tame than the announcement trailer suggests.

"When you have a chance to play it, it's not a peeping Tom kind of game like a lot of Westerners expect," he says. "It's more just a simulator of human communication. The goal isn't to look up the girl's skirt. It's about the reality of communicating with another human being. And that includes the atmosphere. So it doesn't have to be a girl. It could be someone who's interviewing you for a job. There was even a specialist who said that could be used as training for interpersonal communication. It could even be a scene where you're captured by terrorists and they're interrogating you — anything where you have two people communicating up-close."

As an example, Harada says the demo originally starred the character Kazuya from the Tekken series, because the team could re-use existing art assets. But Harada says it didn't give the demo the right atmosphere because a tough male character doesn't offer the level of facial expression or emotion the team wanted.

Ultimately, Harada says that his plan to get attention from the media worked, and he was able to use that attention to get approval to start on another virtual reality project — "the game I had originally wanted to create." He says he's also currently in talks with Sony as to whether they will offer Summer Lesson for players to download or whether it might become something more than a tech demo.

The bucket list

While Summer Lesson may seem like a simple idea, for Harada, it's also a stepping stone to bigger goals. By making Summer Lesson, he got the green light to start another virtual reality project. And he's not sure where that next project might lead.

But he has ideas.

Returning to his thoughts on how many games he can make in the next 20 years, Harada says he currently has three games on his bucket list to make before he retires. The first two, he explains, are "big ideas" for virtual reality games. He keeps the specifics to himself, as these are ideas on paper at the moment and he hopes to make them as the market grows and can support bigger budgets.

"I'd want to have a disclaimer ... 'Not for casual users. Only for hardcore gamers.'"

The third, though, he's happy to detail. He wants to develop a fighting game containing characters from every fighting game franchise that was popular in the 80s and 90s — "or maybe even toward the 2000s," he says. This wouldn't be a party game like Smash Bros., but a traditional fighting game with characters from Capcom, Sega, Koei Tecmo, SNK, Warner Bros, Data East, etc.

"And I'd want to have a disclaimer," he says. "You know how for horror games, it says, 'Not for children'? I'd want to have, 'Not for casual users. Only for hardcore gamers.'"

He says that given the current state of Japan's game industry, probably only Capcom or Bandai Namco could pull that game off, but he'd love to see it happen before he retires.

Now if only he can finish everything else on his plate first.