Shenmue | Code Like It's 198x

In Yokosuka in 1986, on “the day the rain turned to snow”, Ryo Hazuki watches a scar-faced stranger called Lan Di kill his father for the sake of an object called the Phoenix Mirror. Then the player is left alone with Ryo in a town that carries on as if nothing had happened. Shops open and close on time, buses run to the docks, the weather changes, and Ryo’s household expects him home by eight. Shenmue was Yu Suzuki’s attempt, after a decade of arcade driving and fighting games, to build a whole place and a long story inside a console, and its budget became as famous as the game.

Fast facts

Developer: Sega AM2, led by Yu Suzuki. Publisher: Sega.
Format: Dreamcast, on four discs, one of them a “Passport” disc for Sega’s online service.
Released: Japan, 29 December 1999, as Shenmue Chapter 1: Yokosuka; North America, November 2000; Britain, 1 December 2000, at £40.
Sega’s name for its genre: FREE, “Full Reactive Eyes Entertainment”.
Cost: reported at $20 million in 1999, “$40m” and “£43m” in 2000, and $47 million by Suzuki himself in 2011, who said Sega had claimed $70 million.
Sequels: Shenmue II (2001), Shenmue III (2019).

From the Saturn to Project Berkley

Suzuki began the project on the Saturn as a role-playing game built around the Virtua Fighter characters. It moved to the Dreamcast and grew: around 300 people worked on it, Wireframe reported, and “at first we said it would all fit one disc maybe, then two discs, then three,” Suzuki recalled in 2000.

For a long time Sega said almost nothing about it. In January 1999 Computer and Video Games could report only that Suzuki had spent three years on “Project Berkley”, “a whole new genre - FREE (Full Reactive Eyes Entertainment)”, to be revealed in Japan on 20 December 1998. The next month the game had its name. Official Dreamcast Magazine in the United States filled in the design in June 1999: a clock that shaped what the player could do, characters who “keep their own schedules”, weather “modeled from actual data on the game’s locales over the past 20 years”, an orchestra for the soundtrack, and “some 1,200 rooms and locales”.

The Japanese release was set for October 1999, then pushed back to spring 2000. Then Sega brought it forward again, to 29 December 1999. Dreamcast Magazine reported that Sega Japan expected to sell over a million copies at home and over 4.5 million worldwide. Edge recorded 260,000 sold in Japan in the first week.

A town with a timetable

Shenmue takes place in and around the Yokosuka district of Dobuita in the winter of 1986. Every day has a date. Looking back in 2005, Edge found the day-night cycle “more than just GTA with a bedtime”: “shops shut at 18:00, and it’s best to be home before 20:00”, and every day that passed brought “the leaden sensation that the trail leading to Lan Di could well be cooling into obscurity”. Most of the investigation is talking to people and following the clues they give. When Ryo searches a room the view switches to his hands, motion-captured from a model’s, opening drawers and picking up tapes. After the game is finished, an option called Magic Weather replays the real weather of Yokosuka in 1986 and 1987.

The town is full of distractions. At the You Arcade in Dobuita Ryo can play Suzuki’s own Hang-On and Space Harrier for ¥100 a go. To pay for his passage to Hong Kong, where the story continues, he takes a job at the docks driving a forklift truck, complete with forklift races before work.

Ryo walks with the “rotate/walk forward” scheme now called tank controls, on the D-pad, with the analogue stick used to look around. Steven Poole disliked it in Edge in 2001: “This is an elderly system that the N64’s analogue stick was supposed to consign to history.”

Quick Time Events and free battles

The action comes in two forms. In free battles Ryo fights in real time, in the style of Virtua Fighter, and learns extra moves from scrolls and from people he meets. In what the game calls “Quick Timer Events”, a scene plays out and the player must press the button or direction shown on screen at the right moment: in Official Dreamcast Magazine’s list, “elaborate fight sequences”, “mad dashes through city streets” and “balancing on rafters”. Official Dreamcast Magazine compared these to Sega’s own arcade game Die Hard Arcade; Edge in 1999 called them “Dragon’s Lair-style sections”. The idea was older than Shenmue, but the name stuck to it. By 2005 Edge was describing Resident Evil 4’s button prompts as “Quick Time Events” “reminiscent of Shenmue”, and crediting Shenmue as the game that “pioneered” them. Edge’s review found them “integrated into the story particularly well. They are hardly sophisticated in terms of gameplay, but offer a change of pace from the main quest.”

Reception and cost

Edge reviewed the English version in its Christmas 2000 issue and gave it eight out of ten. Earlier that year it had called Shenmue “one of the most expensive and graphically impressive videogaming projects to be undertaken”, and the cost was part of the story from the start. Published figures disagree:

$20 million, with “four years of painstaking work”, in Official Dreamcast Magazine (June 1999). Edge used the same figure in 1999 and 2000, calling Shenmue at $20m “one of the most expensive games to date”.
£43 million “to date”, in Edge’s news statistics for February 2000.
$40 million, in the words of Revolution Software’s Charles Cecil, in Edge in April 2000.
$47 million, according to Suzuki at the Game Developers Conference in 2011. He said Sega had claimed $70 million, and that it was “only $47 million”. Wireframe repeated the $47 million figure in 2020.

Whatever the figure, the game did not recover it on the Dreamcast. Sega announced in January 2001 that it would stop making the console. Wireframe summed up the result: “while it was a critical success, it wasn’t quite the blockbuster Sega had banked a reported $47 million on”.

Shenmue II and III

Shenmue II, set in Hong Kong, came out on the Dreamcast in September 2001, six months after Sega had stopped making the console, and later on the Xbox. Suzuki’s plans for the rest of the story then stalled for more than a decade. Edge wrote in 2005 that “the hungry wish for Shenmue 3 to appear” had become “a call for Lan Di to finally be brought to justice”. Sega re-released the first two games for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on 21 August 2018. Shenmue III, developed by Suzuki’s own studio Ys Net after a Kickstarter campaign in 2015 and published by Deep Silver, came out on 19 November 2019 (see Yu Suzuki).

Sources

Computer and Video Games issue 206, January 1999: “Project Berkley” and FREE, to be revealed on 20 December. Issue 207, February 1999: the game named Shenmue.
Official Dreamcast Magazine (US) issue 0, June 1999: Shenmue feature (the $20 million budget and four years of work; Project Berkeley; schedules, weather data, time, the orchestra, 1,200 locations, first-person searching; Quest, Quick Timer Event, Quick Timer Battle and Free Battle; comparison with Die Hard Arcade).
Edge issue 74, August 1999: Yu Suzuki interview (“development costs to date have famously exceeded $20m”; “Dragon’s Lair-style sections”). Issue 75, September 1999: “At $20m, Shenmue is one of the most expensive games to date”. Issue 78, November 1999: the delay to spring 2000.
Dreamcast Monthly issue 3, November 1999: the planned release of 28 October and the delay. Dreamcast Magazine (UK) issue 4, December 1999, p. 10: the new release date of 29 December and Sega Japan’s sales expectations.
Games Master issue 88, December 1999: Shenmue preview (the forklift job).
Edge issue 81, February 2000: “one of the most expensive and graphically impressive videogaming projects”; news statistics (“Development cost of Shenmue — to date: £43m”). Issue 82, March 2000: Shenmue feature (Sega AM2; Quick Time Events; the ¥100 arcade games; the forklift job) and first-week Japanese sales of 260,000. Issue 83, April 2000: interview with Charles Cecil (“it cost $40m dollars to produce”).
Edge issue 92, Christmas 2000: Shenmue review (UK release 1 December, £40; the dock job and forklift races; the arcade; Quick Time Events); eight out of ten, as listed in Edge’s 2001 index.
Steven Poole, “Trigger Happy”, Edge issue 95, March 2001: Shenmue’s D-pad movement and analogue “look”.
IGN Unplugged issue 7, October 2001: Magic Weather. Issue 15, August 2002: Shenmue II for the Xbox.
Edge issue 145, January 2005: Shenmue retrospective (1986, Lan Di and the Phoenix Mirror, “GTA with a bedtime”, “the hungry wish for Shenmue 3”).
Retro Gamer issue 14, 2005: Sega arcade games in the Shenmue series (the You Arcade in Dobuita).
Edge issue 153, September 2005: Resident Evil 4’s “Quick Time Events” “reminiscent of Shenmue”. Issue 154, October 2005: Fahrenheit review (“the quicktime events that game pioneered”).
Brandon Sheffield, “GDC 2011: Yu Suzuki: ‘Sega Will Probably Let Me Make Shenmue 3’”, Gamasutra, 2 March 2011 (web, secondary): Sega’s $70 million claim and Suzuki’s $47 million. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/gdc-2011-yu-suzuki-sega-will-probably-let-me-make-i-shenmue-3-i-
Wikipedia, “Shenmue (video game)” (web, secondary): North American release in November 2000 and European release on 1 December 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenmue_(video_game)
Game Informer, “Shenmue I & II Gets August Release Date”, 3 July 2018 (web, secondary): the 21 August 2018 re-release. https://www.gameinformer.com/2018/07/03/shenmue-i-ii-gets-august-release-date
Wireframe issue 43, September 2020, pp. 84–89: “Developer Profile: Yu Suzuki” (the Saturn origins, 300 staff, the discs, $47 million, the result, Shenmue II in September 2001). Issue 24, October 2019, and issue 29, December 2019: Shenmue III (Ys Net, Deep Silver, 19 November 2019; the Kickstarter).