For years now, Yoshinori Ono has been the public face of Street Fighter. And Street Fighter’s defined his life – having fallen in love with Final Fight, Ono made a beeline for Capcom and found himself working there soon after Street Fighter 2’s release and through the series’ glory years. He became a household name, though, for helping bring Street Fighter back from the wilderness.
“This was before social media, before the internet, before Facebook,” Ono told me during an on-stage interview at last month’s EGX. “It wasn’t until I was working on Onimusha that I could see what a phenomenon it had become. I was going around with Inafune, but people would always be asking me about Street Fighter. So I went back to Capcom and said the world was ready for more Street Fighter.” Bringing back Street Fighter wouldn’t be simple, though. “It was tough. As a company, Capcom were past making fighting games in general. It was 99.99 per cent decided that fighting games were done and dusted and we were moving on to other things. But I managed to convince [Keiji] Inafune and the then-chairman – they were like, okay we’ll give it a shot. That’s all it took for me to flip those percentages. If it hadn’t gone as well as it did, I might have been fired… I’m glad Street Fighter 4 did as well as it did.”
The series has flourished ever since – even if it hasn’t been without its struggles. Street Fighter 5 saw through a rough launch period and is now an assured fighter with one of the strongest communities around it – at EGX, the Capcom Pro Tour stage was one of the most vibrant, well-attended of the whole show. And next year it’s becoming part of the Intel World Open, a tournament that welcomes all-comers through its early online rounds before the grand finals take place alongside next year’s Olympics in Tokyo, with a $250,000 prize pot up for grabs.
The big online tournament is being enabled by some big updates coming to Street Fighter 5 later this year, and the day after our on-stage chat at EGX I met up with Ono in Capcom’s Hammersmith offices to talk about where the series is at, and where it’s heading in the future.
In terms of the big updates that have been teased to be coming later this year – well, none of it’s leaked so far.
Yoshinori Ono: I can’t really go into details – the main thrust will be this additional mode. At the moment we have group tournament – it’s about eight people that can be invited to a lobby. This new mode will blow that out of the water in terms of scale. We’re still working out details in the beta, but it’ll certainly be dozens, hundreds of people that can take part in a tournament at the same time. We’re fine-tuning that and that’ll be ready in the coming months.
Is this part of a big refresh for Street Fighter 5?
Yoshinori Ono: Not so much, it’s just the addition of this new feature. Maybe when I say big update, you’re imagining the old days of Super and Ultra. I think it’s a big addition to the game, but as you’ve seen, the strategy for the title has been gradually adding more features, more characters and it’s gradually gotten bigger over time.