"It was the first time I'd publicised my work at Capcom," says Shigeno, from Capcom's main office in Osaka. "But I actually joined the company in 2007." Indeed, the 25-year-old has been a tester on the majority of Capcom's recent fighting games - Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Street Fighter x Tekken, and early iterations of Street Fighter 4 - searching for bugs in the code. A tester's hours are long and the work monotonously hard, but Shigeno had proved himself a diligent and useful asset. He was moved from bug-testing to work on Ultra Street Fighter 4's content analysis team, where he had to check the balancing of characters, ensuring that there were no moves that could be exploited by a skilled player to upset the game's fine-balance.
Development of Street Fighter 5 was well underway when Shigeno was called into a superior's office and given an extraordinary offer. Capcom, he was told, had taken notice of Shigeno's talent, not only at playing fighting games, but also at improving them. Would he consider, they asked, taking on the role of Battle Director on the company's flagship video game. "I felt honoured and grateful, of course," he says. "But, since that day, also constant pressure. My job is to improve Street Fighter's gameplay. Can you imagine? That is an enormous responsibility."