Street Fighter IV's lead producer, Yoshinori Ono, isn't shy about his intentions when it comes to the hotly-anticipated fighting game. In his mind, its success would represent nothing short of the fighting game's renaissance. There's no doubt that a good deal of its impact is riding on how well the game fares in its transition to consoles. It's with this in mind that we spoke to Mr. Ono about Capcom's plans for the game's destiny, both in regards to its launch and what will become of it post-release.

GameSpy: It seems like Street Fighter IV has been more console-focused in its development than any other big-name fighting game we've seen before. Is this a correct assessment? If so, how has this influenced its development?
Yoshinori Ono, Lead Producer: It wasn't our deliberate intention to focus more on consoles over arcade. However, historically, fighting games have been largely about improving over their previous iterations -- making them better, while making them harder, maybe. That's the approach we took with Street Fighter 3: Third Strike. I like to use the analogy of chess -- it was like a championship chess tournament in that not too wide of an audience was able to participate on a high level.


With Street Fighter IV, we wanted to revive the fighting genre, and we wanted to bring back the lapsed players who played Street Fighter II. We view this game as a tool similar to chess more than a videogame; anyone should be able to use it to have fun. Grandparents should be able to use it to have fun with their grandchildren on a Sunday afternoon.

We're aiming to revive and improve the fighting genre by making it accessible to a broader range of people. Maybe that's why you got the impression that it was more console-focused.
GameSpy: But given that it will be on consoles in a big way, can we expect much in the way of post-release content? Like characters, stages, musical arrangements?
Yoshinori Ono: Going back to the chess analogy, characters [in fighting games] are like rules, and you have to master the rules to enjoy them too. So while we are working on downloadable content, characters will not be downloadable. We don't necessarily want to increase the complexity of the rules. And also, I think it's a little bit unfair that those guys with a bit more money will have more characters. But yes, we are working on some downloadable content.