uring last week’s German Games Convention in Leipzig, we had the chance to talk with two high-profile producers in Capcom’s booth. Yoshinori Ono is in charge of Street Fighter IV, a return to form that aims to walk the line between accessibility and flexibility. If the strategy works, it’ll give both lapsed fans and die-hard tournament fighters an incentive to plunk some change in arcade machines or check out the console versions. Ben Judd is helming the Bionic Commando reboots, with the recently released downloadable update Bionic Commando: Rearmed and the upcoming Xbox 360, PS3 and PC game.

Both producers unsurprisingly had a lot to say about their games, including the possibilities of Wii ports (both are possibilities, if you’re keeping score), fan reactions and much more.

Yoshinori Ono

Has the current state of the arcade scene affected development of Street Fighter IV?
“It was a kind of give-and-take situation,” says Ono. “When you think about how Street Fighter was supported by the arcade game, and now obviously how the arcade market is now declining all over the world. Having said that, we were committed to helping the arcade market, and they wanted us to give them a good product. We didn’t think about creating something at a budget price or anything like that because of the state of the arcade market. We think that we collaborated well in that sense.”

Street Fighter III had updates every seven or eight months—will that continue with IV?
Don’t count on it. “At the moment, we haven’t got any plans to update Street Fighter IV,” says Ono. “We have to monitor it for a year or so to see how it goes. We’re showing the console version here, too, so we have to see how the console market is, too. We just have to see.” To be blunt though, if you don’t think the team hasn’t been thinking about future iterations of Street Fighter IV, you have a lot to learn about squeezing money out of a franchise.

Is the arcade feedback going to feed into the console version?
“The Street Fighter IV arcade version is played by only a part of the Japanese community, so learning from that and trying to apply it to the global market is a bit nonsensical,” Ono says. “I’m not really thinking about that. However, I’m working on the tuning of the game, game balance and et cetera, for instance adding the new characters to the console version. I’m going to work on that aspect rather than straightaway taking the feedback from the arcade version and applying it to console.”

How much time has Ono’s team had between the arcade and console versions?
“Initially, I wanted it to be as long as it took for me to be satisfied, but I’m under the pressure from the marketing and sales departments, so that’s not going to happen,” he says, laughing.

How about those new characters?
“As you know, we took voting from fans at Comic-Con, and Cammie became the number one popular character,” he says. “We had Gouki [Akuma] second or third, and he’s already included in the arcade version. We haven’t really decided which characters will be added yet.” Don’t expect to see a bloated roster, though. “I’ve been telling everyone that Street Fighter IV isn’t a piece of entertainment, it’s more of a tool like chess. In order to enjoy that, you have to know the rules. If you have 100 characters, you have to know every single one—and that would be really too much. I’m going to figure out how many need to be in Street Fighter IV.”

How does he approach new characters?
“When you look at it like a chess board from above, Street Fighter II had all of these small characters, if you like,” Ono says. “I realized that the queen, or some of the more important characters, were lacking, so I just put Abel as a queen, which is a pretty bad analogy [laughs]. Maybe he’s a knight!”

On Rufus…
“We had some other candidates apart from Rufus, but we decided on that character because everyone is going to talk about him—that character is going to freak lots of people out,” Ono says. “But when you think about it, we introduced Blanka, and he’s not a normal guy. But now he’s a normal part of Street Fighter. We’ve done that sort of thing in the past, so why not make something freaky again? By next year, people will just play him and he’ll be normal within the Street Fighter universe. If someone likes really cool-looking characters, they’d go to a Virtua Fighter or a Tekken—not Street Fighter. I think Street Fighter has a lot of not-so sophisticated, kind of comical characters, so Rufus fits well.”

Now about that Wii version…
“We’ve had a lot of requests for Street Fighter IV on Wii,” he says. “Since it’s a 2D fighting game, it’s doable, but whether we’d try we don’t know. We’d have to see. If we can sell it, we might consider it. And it would be a straight-forward Street Fighter IV—it wouldn’t be a kid’s version.”