He is best known to Western audiences for his steampunk-inspired visual novel, Gadget, and for his work on the 2004 film, Casshern.
With evidence of visual artistry talent already apparent, Shono was entrusted with the responsibility to act as lead visual display artist in Radical TV's audio-visual display showcase at Expo '85 entitled TV War.
This game won Shono the Multimedia Grand Prix MITI Minister's Prize.
In 1992 Shono would again win the MITI Prize for his game L-Zone, which would remain on Japan's list of best-selling CD-ROMs for several years.
For his striking visual style and his mastery of lavish computer graphics at the dawn of the point-and-click adventure game genre, Newsweek named him one of the "most influential people to watch in Cyberspace,"[3] and coined the term "cybergames"[4] to describe his highly-realistic visual games whose visual style have been compared to those of Cyan's 1993 best-seller, Myst.