Why a niche game for a failed console continues to inspire passion in its fans more than a decade later, and how it broke Kickstarter and Guinness World Records

Q. What would your dream Shenmue be?

A. One where the player could live in that world. A second life.

Yu Suzuki

Part I: Of Dreams and Dreamcasts

The 15th of June 2015. It is the 21st Electronic Entertainment Expo, better known as E3. Game developers and publishers battle it out to win the hearts, minds and wallets of gamers watching all over the world. The three remaining console manufacturers, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony, vie for exclusives that will grant them a greater share of an industry that is worth over $90 billion. After Microsoft’s showing the previous night touting sequels to contemporary popular franchises such as Halo, Sony took the stage and announced that The Last Guardian, a one-time PlayStation 3 game assumed to have been cancelled, had been reworked for the PS4. Following it up with a long-awaited remake of the beloved PlayStation title Final Fantasy VII, victory was already being declared by many for Sony at this year’s E3. As the applause for Square’s game died down, Sony’s Adam Boyes walked on and talked of the recent success of crowd-funding for games on Kickstarter that eventually made their way to Sony’s console. He spoke of a title that PlayStation fans had been “very, very vocal about…”

Cherry blossom petals fell on-screen, and a Chinese violin began to play a few familiar notes. The audience erupted. At long last, after an eternity of waiting, it was here.

Shenmue III.

An unassuming Japanese man walked on to a standing ovation, holding back tears as he counted down to the launch of the much-awaited sequel’s fund-raising campaign.

But amid the cheers and roars of the faithful who had prayed for this moment for more than 14 years, many at E3 and at home were asking themselves…

“What’s Shenmue?”

The year is 1996, and the outlook for Sega is grim. Having at one point successfully usurped the reigning video game champion, Nintendo, they now found themselves not only lagging behind their longtime rival, but being outshone by a newcomer to the gaming world. Two years prior at the same E3 that the Sega Saturn met with a muted reception, the Japanese electronics giant Sony formally announced the PlayStation (its own genesis as a CD add-on for the Super Nintendo is infamous, though less well-known is that a Sega-Sony console was proposed at one time). Arguably technically superior in its 3D capabilities to the Saturn, and certainly easier to code for than Sega’s console, this perception along with a lower price tag endeared it to developers and buyers alike, leaving Sega in the West to consider what means they would have to take to ensure their survival (though the Saturn ended up being Sega’s most successful console in Japan).

As the death knell was being rung for the Saturn in the West, Sega of Japan’s AM2 division was working on a new game. It took its roots from their popular Virtua Fighter series, but had ambitions that eclipsed not only its fighting game origins, but also anything seen before in video games. The director of this project had always pushed the boundaries, and he was now being given a blank cheque by his employer to devise a system seller.

1983. Having failed his entrance exams to dental school and not having much luck with the guitar, a young man named Yu Suzuki drew inspiration from the toy blocks of his childhood and decided to take computer programming classes while at the Okayama University of Science. Upon graduating he looked to put his newfound coding skills to the test and joined Sega. After developing Champion Boxing for the SG-1000 console, Suzuki set up his own division within Sega called AM2, tired of having his pay docked for not turning up at 8:30am. The late starts were not a symptom of laziness; on the contrary, Suzuki consistently held the company record for overtime during his time at Sega, sleeping on a flattened cardboard box on the office floor; Suzuki reminisced in a recent interview, “when the president of Sega found out, he decided to put a shower in the office and set up a room where people could take naps.” At the 2011 Game Developer’s Conference (GDC), Mark Cerny quipped that the joke everyone told was that the name AM2 came from the fact that 2:00am was the only time all the developers were in the office.

“The hours between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m. became [Suzuki’s] favourite time of day, a time when he could escape from the distractions of managing a team and work for himself. “During those two hours, I got the equivalent of a normal person’s two weeks of work done,” he says. And when he did fall asleep, he would keep a pen, pad and recorder next to him in case he came up with an idea in his dreams — a practice he termed a “pop-up.”

Visualising the right camera mechanics in Virtua Cop? Came to him in a pop-up. Balancing the characters Wolf and Jeffry in Virtua Fighter? Came to him in a pop-up.”

Two hours in Yu Suzuki’s kitchen, Matt Leone, January 2015

In July 1985 Suzuki and AM2 released their first game: the arcade title Hang-On, which saw gamers straddling a replica bike, leaning left and right to steer the bike as they raced down winding roads.

Hang-On introduced the “Taikan” trend of motion-controlled arcade cabinets that resemble real-world vehicles. These helped dispel the negative image that arcades had in Japan at the time and attract new audiences.

Suzuki followed up the success of Hang-On with increasingly well-received arcade titles such as Space Harrier, legendary racer Out Run, and the Top Gun-influenced After Burner. His desire to take games into the third dimension saw the creation of Virtua Racing, but it was the 1993 release of the first 3D fighting game, Virtua Fighter, that resonated with gamers and saw the birth of a franchise.

Initially wanting to make a 3D sports game, it became apparent that technology at the time would not allow for more than two polygonal characters onscreen, and this combined with Sega’s desire to make a “Street Fighter-killer” led to Suzuki turning to the one-on-one fighting genre. Virtua Fighter 2 became the first game to employ motion-capture technology, previously only used in healthcare and the military. As with his earlier games, Suzuki eschewed the fantastical in favour of a more realistic approach, choosing to forgo hadoukens and spinning bird kicks and instead to ground the game in the martial arts of the Orient. It was in 1993 during research for the second game in the series that Yu Suzuki would embark on a trip to China that would change the course of both his life and video game history forever.

On their first meeting, Bajiquan Grand Master Wu drank a little too much sake, and the resulting drunken fighting style inspired the Virtua Fighter 2 character Shun Di.

Infatuated with everything the country had to offer, from the martial art of Bajiquan to street vendors selling pork buns, Suzuki was determined that his first foray into story-driven gaming would draw from the richness of the Chinese culture.

Disappointed with the RPGs (role-playing games) that existed at the time, in particular their lack of voice acting and basic graphics, in 1995 Suzuki put together a prototype for the Saturn called The Old Man & The Peach Tree. Set in Luoyang, the historic capital of China, it followed the well-worn trope of a young student seeking the wisdom of an old kung fu master. The prototype was not known to the public until Suzuki brought it up in an extensive November 2013 interview with the Russian video game magazine Strana Igr (Gameland):

Just imagine: an open world, where there are growing apples and peaches, that you can collect. An old man is sitting on a bench. You ask him questions but he ignores them and whines that he wants a peach. If you bring him an apple or mandarin, he gets angry and yells that he doesn’t eat those. Another old man is fishing, and there are kids playing around him. But in fact he is a great master of martial arts. And he is so cool that he throws a pebble in the water and kills three fishes with the ricochet, which float belly-up. The kids are happy. He is such a professional, and not only in martial arts. Here’s another example: you are travelling from one city to another, and you see a man standing by a bridge. You want to pass through and the old man throws his sandals into the river. Then he says to the protagonist, “Oh, I lost them somehow, can you bring them for me?” He also is a master in martial arts, and this request is a goal, which you need to complete. Even if you manage to find the items he demands, he would throw things into the water again and beg you to bring them back. You would need to do it three times for him to make sure you are patient enough, so he would then give you valuable information.

From this simple story and prototype came the beginnings of Virtua Fighter RPG.

Early concept art for Virtua Fighter RPG of Akira as a high school student. Before deciding to go into programming, Suzuki considered a career as an illustrator.

Initially centred around Virtua Fighter’s Akira, Suzuki determined that it would be the first truly 3D RPG. Players would talk with fully-voiced non-playable characters (NPCs), and there would be real-time fighting against multiple opponents.

The original script for The Legend of Akira, and what would become Shenmue I & II. 3 of these sold for $10,000 each during the Shenmue III Kickstarter.

Unusually for a developer, Suzuki is not particularly fond of gaming in his own free time. In the case of Shenmue, he sought to draw inspiration from films, in particular the kung-fu movies of Hong Kong cinema he loved so dearly. He hired screenwriters from the Japanese film industry to give the project the cinematic quality he strove for, and even real-world architects to give an air of authenticity to the game’s homes and buildings. Suzuki tasked Toshiyuki Watanabe with composing a four-part orchestral suite to aid the creative process. Akira’s Story/The Legend of Akira would in turn have a four-act structure, which evolved into an 11-chapter epic. Along with a novelised outline came 11 pieces of concept art, revealed to fans for the first time at GDC 2014.