Yoshinori Ono

Yoshinori Ono (小野義徳, Ono Yoshinori^?) is a Japanese video game producer and former brand manager of Capcom. Regarded as the driving force behind Street Fighter since its "revival" with Street Fighter IV in 2008, Ono is a minor celebrity for the fighting game community. In August 2020, Ono announced that he would leave Capcom.^[1]

History[]

According to Ono, in junior school he would visit a large bookstore to read about programming. In high school, however, he decided to get into music and learned the keyboard. In university, he studied Architectural Mechanics in order to have access to a faculty with a supercomputer. He learned the guitar and began to specialize in 3D fluid rendering, to the point where his mentor said he could postgraduate work.^[2]

Instead, he responded to a job advertisement as a composer with Capcom, as he was familiar with the company from playing Final Fight in arcades, sending in a demo tape of himself on the guitar. He was called in for interview and hired the next day. His job consisted of manually programming music in binary by converting to FM format, with his first project being the Mega Drive port of 1993's Muscle Bomber, known overseas as Saturday Night Slam Masters.^[3] He then worked on ports of Super Street Fighter II X and Street Fighter Alpha: Warriors' Dreams. ^[2]^[3] Additionally, he composed music for the home console version of Street Fighter: The Movie (aka Street Fighter: Real Battle on Film).

His transition to a management role came about the time he was working on the Street Fighter III series, where he did human resources management in addition to his regular duties. However after 3rd Strike, the series was seen as "dead" and it wasn't until Ono's promotion to producer and his grassroots campaign to get public demand up that a small budget for R&D was allocated for a prototype for Street Fighter IV.^[2]

Since the success of Street Fighter IV and its updates, Ono was viewed as the 'godfather' of the series and he continued to promote it and drive demand.

In 9th August 2020, Ono announced that he would leave Capcom after serving almost 30 years at the company.^[1]

In April 2021, he would join Delightworks as its new president and chief operating officer (COO) in May 1st.^[4]

Public persona[]

Ono is regarded by much of the fanbase as a "troll"^[5]^[6], although whether this is perceived as endearing or not is a matter of some debate. Ono, for his part, has said that "as long as nobody stabs [him] [he is] happy to receive criticism".^[2]

Jollibee-Kids-Meal-promocard-StreetFighterII-CombatAcademy — Promotional image of the Jollibee's Kids Meal with Ryu, Blanka and Ken toys.

He is visually associated with the character Blanka, as Ono has an old Blanka toy that he brings with him seemingly everywhere. Ono places the toy in the foreground of most (if not all) on-location photos that he tweets. According to his Twitter account, Ono obtained this toy, along with a few extra, from the hamburger restaurant Jollibee Kids Meal set in the Philippines (similar to the Happy Meals from McDonald's).^[7] Currently one of them is broken, and Ono keeps the other close to him.