He has been a director and producer for several series at Capcom, including Rival Schools, Power Stone, Devil May Cry and Dragon's Dogma.
Hideaki Itsuno was a fighting game fan who was hired by Capcom in 1994; his entrance exam happened the same day as the Super Street Fighter II Turbo location test.
[2] There, he was assigned work as a designer on their arcade division (which by 1997 had been reorganized as Production Studio 1), starting with two quiz games.
In that first year at the company, a project for a Street Fighter prequel was brewing; Itsuno's superior Noritaka Funamizu saw there was no designer attached, and asked him to take that role in December.
[1][2] His first director job was on another fighter, Star Gladiator, a project he entered halfway through to fulfill a desire: "at the time I wanted to make that kind of game with a large scale cabinet, because Capcom had never done anything like that before.
Driven to make a 60fps polygon-based fighting game, he conceived an original project with wide appeal—driven so partly by a more story-heavy approach and the inclusion of role-playing elements—which became Rival Schools: United By Fate.
[4] Itsuno was asked to "reorganize the project" in a supplementary role, which effectively meant taking over leadership, as upper management saw it as director-less.
Alex Jones and Motohide Eshiro acted as producers, aiming to help Ninja Theory make DmC play like the previous Devil May Cry games.
[22] During the press conference at Capcom's Captivate event in 2011, he called it a game he had been dreaming of making since his school days, which could be finally realized due to technological advancements.
At the time of the press conference, he had been directing a staff of 150 people at Capcom Japan for three years of concept and project development.
Itsuno has also expressed interest in developing a fighting game that would recreate the influence Street Fighter II had on the genre.