Katsuhiro Harada, former director of the Tekken series, has shared an amusing anecdote about a cultural misunderstanding he experienced with his international fans after revealing Leroy Smith for Tekken 7.

Leroy Smith, a Wing Chun practitioner, was an instant hit when he was first revealed in Tekken 7. The character’s popularity even inspired cosplays from celebrities like T-Pain.

However, what happened next caught Harada off guard. Black American fans started ‘inviting Harada to the cookout,’ leaving the Japanese game director extremely confused.

In a recent post on X, Harada opened up about the humorous exchange. He revealed that after Leroy was announced in 2019, he received a message from the American fan community: ‘Can we invite you to the cookout for making an awesome character like this?’

Harada explained that, at the time, he had been seeing the word ‘cooked’ a lot online, as well as reading articles that were ‘spreading hate toward video games.’ Having learned to associate the word ‘cooked’ with terms like ‘destroyed,’ he was under the impression that fans hated Leroy.

For one terrifying moment, I read it as: ‘Hey, we’d we’d can invite you to a party where we’re going to beat you up and roast you?’ he continued. ‘Even though I thought I knew America pretty well, I genuinely wondered if I’d somehow pressed some invisible cultural button that I wasn’t supposed to touch.’

Luckily, someone eventually explained the concept of getting invited to the cookout. Harada explained that it was like receiving ‘one of the highest compliments possible’ – basically saying, ‘You’re someone we’d trust enough to invite to our close-knit family BBQ, where only real friends and loved ones are welcome.’

That explanation was a huge relief, he continued. ‘Then they started showing me BBQ equipment and ingredients, and I was absolutely shocked that everything was several times bigger than what we have in Japan. Sure, I expected the smoker grills to be huge. But even the tongs and spatulas were enormous, and the meat looked like something I’d only ever seen as loot in an MMORPG.’

Looking back now, I honestly regret not immediately flying to the U.S. and accepting an invitation to one of those community cookouts. That really was the perfect opportunity.

Harada confirmed that he was greatly influenced by several prominent Black figures, specifically citing Michael Jackson, Wesley Snipes as Blade, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Game of Death, and Jim Kelly in Enter the Dragon.

Of course I can’t claim that I fully understand what you call Black culture. But if we’re talking about the parts that have genuinely influenced me, the cookout story is certainly one of them, he said.

Harada famously left Bandai Namco and the Tekken franchise earlier this year, choosing to open his own development house, VS Studio, where he hopes to create a new fighting game and return to his roots in game development.