Shenmue is dead. Again.

Giuseppe Nelva January 2, 2012 1:30 PM EST

Many old school gamers would give an arm to hear something official about the third chapter of the Shenmue series. Japan actually got a third game: Shenmue Gai (Shenmue City), even if it was just a social spin-off on the Yahoo! Mobage platform.

Shenmue creator Yu Suzuki went as far as hinting to a possible western localization of the game, even if nothing final has ever been anounced.

I’m writing in past tense, as Sunsoft (that handled the game under the supervision of Sega) terminated the service on December the 26th after about little more than one year of operation, leaving Shenmue fans orphaned of their favorite franchise once again.

The service was terminated in a quite an sudden way, as no news were published on the official site since last July. on the 26th a simple message saying “Service termination: thank you for your patronage” appeared, and that was it.

You can count this between the mysteries clouding the continuation of the Shenmue series. Will we ever see Shenmue 3? I hope so, but after this I’m not holding my breath about it.