Tekken director Katsuhiro Harada's recent YouTube vlog (courtesy of Kotaku) revealed how close he came to causing a diplomatic rift between Capcom and Microsoft thanks to a failed prank on his long-time rival, Street Fighter producer Yoshinori Ono.
For years, Harada and Ono had engaged in a friendly rivalry, posting their shenanigans on Twitter to the amusement of both Tekken and Street Fighter fans. As Harada recounts, this rivalry very nearly landed Capcom in hot water with Microsoft at Gamescom years ago.
"I went to Gamescom with Ono-san," Harada remembers. “I was going to play a trick, so I asked him [for his hotel room number] naturally so that he wouldn’t realize.”
The prank was fairly simple. Instead of a standard "do not disturb" sign, Harada created a hand-drawn "Please Disturb" sign and hung it from Ono-san's doorknob. Besides asking for anyone to disturb him, the sign also had a Street Fighter 4 sticker and a picture of a poop emoji.
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Later, Capcom and Bandai Namco sat down for a group dinner where Harada showed Ono a picture of the sign that he'd posted to Twitter. "I tweeted like, 'How funny would it be if he got woken up,'" Harada-san said. "Ono-san had no idea I played a prank like this."
But as the two fighting game producers giggled, other Capcom executives "started turning pale." They asked for the room number Harada placed his prank sign, and their expressions got even worse after he said room 514.
"Ono-san being Ono-san, he lied,” said Harada. “He said a random number" when he asked for Ono-san’s hotel info, which meant that sign was hung from someone else attending Gamescom.
The two did some research and found out that the room number belonged to a bloc that was assigned to Microsoft, and not just regular Microsoft studios folks but a "one of the top executives, like a director."
Fortunately for Harada, he never heard of any consequences for his failed prank.
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