Shenmue (video game)

The player controls the teenage martial artist Ryo Hazuki as he investigates his father's murder in Yokosuka in 1986. They explore the open world, searching for clues, examining objects and talking to non-player characters. Occasionally, Ryo battles opponents in fighting sequences similar to Sega's Virtua Fighter series; outside of combat, players can practice moves to increase their power. In quick-time events, the player must press the right button within a time limit to succeed. Shenmue features a persistent world with detail considered unprecedented for games at the time. Shops open and close, buses run to timetables, and characters have routines, each per the in-game clock. Edge described Shenmue as "a game of middle management, often composed of the unglamorous daily grinds—being home for bedtime, wisely spending money earned from a day job, or training combat moves through lonely practice—that other games bypass". Ryo receives a daily allowance which can be spent on items including food, raffle tickets, audio cassettes and capsule toys. There are several minigames; in the local arcade, for example, Ryo can throw darts or play complete versions of the Sega arcade games Hang-On and Space Harrier. Later in the game, Ryo gets a part-time job at the docks and must ferry crates between warehouses and compete in races using a forklift. == Plot ==

In Yokosuka, Japan, 1986, the teenage martial arts student Ryo Hazuki returns to his family dojo to witness a confrontation between his father, Iwao, and a Chinese man, Lan Di. Lan Di easily incapacitates Ryo, and threatens to kill him unless Iwao gives him a mysterious stone artifact, the dragon mirror. Iwao tells him the mirror is buried under the cherry blossom tree outside. As his men recover the mirror, Lan Di mentions a man he claims Iwao killed in China. He delivers a finishing blow and Iwao dies in Ryo's arms. Ryo swears revenge on Lan Di and asks locals for information. As he is about to run out of leads, a letter addressed to Ryo's father arrives from a Chinese man, Zhu Yuanda, suggesting he seek the aid of Master Chen, who works at Yokosuka Harbor. Through Chen and his son Guizhang, Ryo learns that the mirror taken by Lan Di is one of two. He locates the second, the phoenix mirror, in a hidden basement beneath the family dojo. Chen reveals that Lan Di has left Japan for Hong Kong. Ryo borrows money to buy a boat ticket from a disreputable travel agency. When he goes to collect the ticket, he is ambushed by Chai, a member of Lan Di's criminal organization, the Chi You Men, who destroys his ticket. Ryo learns that the Chi You Men is connected to the local harbor gang, the Mad Angels, and takes a job at the harbor as a forklift driver to investigate. After he causes trouble, the Mad Angels kidnap his schoolfriend Nozomi. Ryo rescues her and makes a deal with the Mad Angels leader to beat up Guizhang in exchange for a meeting with Lan Di. Ryo realizes the deal is a trap and teams up with Guizhang to defeat the Mad Angels. Ryo arranges to take a boat to Hong Kong with Guizhang. On the day of departure, they are attacked by Chai. Ryo defeats him, but Guizhang is injured and urges Ryo to go without him, saying he will meet him in China later. Chen advises Ryo to seek the help of a martial artist in Hong Kong named Lishao Tao. Ryo boards the boat and leaves for Hong Kong. ==Development==

Sega Saturn prototypes Shenmue was created by Yu Suzuki. After joining Sega in 1983, Suzuki created several successful arcade games including Hang-On (1985), Out Run (1986) and Virtua Fighter (1993). In comparison to arcade games, where the ideal experience is only a few minutes long, Suzuki wanted to make a longer experience and researched role-playing games (RPGs). Taro brings an old man a peach in exchange for information about the grandmaster; at the end of the game, the man skillfully skips stones across water to hunt fish, revealing that he is the grandmaster. Move to Dreamcast Sega planned to release a graphics accelerator add-on to enable the game to run on Saturn. In 1997, after the add-on was canceled, development moved to Sega's upcoming console, the Dreamcast. By the time of the Dreamcast's release that November, it had been retitled Shenmue. The team worked with interior decorators to design more than 1,200 rooms and locations, and created over 300 characters, each with names, personalities and relationships, some modeled on Sega employees, with detailed clay models as animation references. Meteorological records of 1986 Yokosuka were used to create algorithmically generated weather and day-and-night cycles. To fit the material onto a manageable number of discs, AM2 developed a new type of data compression. The scripts were translated by several people, creating consistency problems, and arrived late, leaving no time for rewrites or proper direction. and groundwork for future Shenmue games. == Promotion and release ==

On November 27, 1998, Sega released the Dreamcast in Japan. The launch game Virtua Fighter 3tb, also directed by Suzuki, included a preview disc of Shenmue featuring FMV scenes and an interview with Suzuki, but no gameplay footage. On December 20, Sega unveiled Shenmue at a conference at the Yokohama International Assembly Hall and demonstrated its clock, weather and quick-time event systems; fans could watch the conference online. However, the quick-time events angered some fans, who had assumed Shenmue would only use Virtua Fighter-style battles. which was delayed to August 5. Sega also announced that Shenmue had been delayed to October 28. On June 22, Sega announced a "Shenmue subway tour", showing playable demos at Japanese train stations that August. before moving it to the final week of 1999. Sega released Shenmue on December 29, 1999, in Japan, November 7, 2000, in North America, and December 1, 2000, in Europe. ==Reception==

Critical Shenmue held an average aggregate score of 89% on GameRankings. GameSpot wrote that though Shenmue is "far from perfect" it was "revolutionary" and "worth experiencing—provided you have the time to invest". Edge initially called the Japanese version a "landmark"; they later said the English version was not the "milestone" they had hoped for, but was "involving, and ultimately rewarding". According to the Guardian critic Keith Stuart, while many players rejected the "systemic and narrative oddities", fans enjoyed the "wooden voice acting and clipped dialogue" and found humor in it. GameSpot wrote that by "the time you're driving forklifts and participating in the game's QTE-filled conclusion, hours upon hours of boredom will have taken their toll". It eventually sold 1.2 million copies and became one of the Dreamcast's highest-selling games. However, its sales did not cover its development cost and analysts consider it a major commercial failure. USgamer wrote that though the sales would have been a success for most games, only an "impossible" number of sales would have seen Shenmue turn a profit. The Dreamcast engineer and future Sega president Hideki Sato defended Shenmue as an "investment [which] will someday be recouped" because the lessons learnt during development could be applied to other games. Edge awarded it for "Graphical Achievement", writing that Suzuki's "experiment in creating what is a complete, populated virtual world in which a game occurs proves to be a mighty success, particularly the "breathtaking" level of detail of the character models, and that never had there been "such a convincing representation of real life" in a video game. During the 4th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards in March 2001, Shenmue received the "Console Innovation" award, along with nominations for "Game of the Year", "Console Game of the Year", "Character or Story Development", and "Game Design". == Legacy ==

In 2009, the IGN Xbox editor Hilary Goldstein praised Shenmue for its "great ideas", but said it was "ultimately uninteresting". The editor of IGN Nintendo, Matt Casamassina, felt it was "more of a technical demo than a coherent game". However, the IGN UK writer Martin Robinson described it as "a deeply personal game" that "opened my eyes to a whole new world for video games, suggesting that they didn't have to be about shooting aliens in the face, rescuing the princess or slaying orcs for hours on end — they could be about real people in a real place ... It's the mundane moments that gave Shenmue its poetry." In his 2010 book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die, David McCarthy wrote of ''Shenmue's "paradigmatic impact on the entire video game industry". According to McCarthy, while it appears "crude and blocky" compared to modern games, Shenmue "recreated the real world with ... attention to detail that has never been rivaled". In a 2014 retrospective, Edge'' wrote that "some were entranced by the game's abounding atmosphere and visual detail. Others left frozen by clumpy interaction with an unthreatening, almost rustic world ... where they'd wander the districts of Yokosuka while asking unusual questions to pensioners and hairdressers." Reviews of the HD ports of Shenmue in 2018 were less positive. Destructoids Peter Glagowski wrote that Shenmue had "interesting concepts that are marred by poor execution", and criticized the combat and slow pacing. He concluded: "This open-world design was truly original and fascinating in 1999, but there really wasn't a need to include half of the features that Shenmue has." The Escapist critic Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw disliked the "relentless" and "frenetic" combat, and felt that the open world lacked content between key story moments. The critic James Stephanie Sterling wrote that "Shenmue is dreadful [...] Maybe at the turn of the millennium when this game was worth a shit it could get away with being bold, but boldness is no excuse for wasting the player's time, having absolutely no respect for the audience or its patience, and generally expecting people to make their own fun in a game that doesn't really give all that many tools to have fun with." Shenmue attracted a cult following. Fans visit Dobuita Street in Yokosuka, where most of the game is set. It has been included in several lists of the greatest games of all time. In 2007, Edge named it the 50th-greatest game, and in 2008 it was voted the 25th-greatest in Game's reader poll of more than 100,000 votes. In 2006 and 2008, IGN readers voted Shenmue the 81st-greatest game. In April 2011, Empire ranked it the 42nd-best game. That September, readers of the German games magazine M! Games voted Shenmue the best game of all time, and in October MSN UK named it one of the 20 best. In 2014, Shenmue was named the 71st-best by Slant Magazine and the seventh by Empire. Shenmue is credited for pioneering several game technologies. Shenmue is also credited for naming and popularizing the quick-time event, In a public poll held by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 2025, Shenmue was voted the most influential game of all time. ==Sequels==

Suzuki planned Shenmue to cover several games. Shenmue II, developed simultaneously with Shenmue, was released in 2001 in Japan and Europe and 2002 in North America. It was also a commercial failure, and Shenmue III entered a period of development hell lasting over a decade. In 2004, Sega announced a massively multiplayer online role-playing game for PC set in the Shenmue world, Shenmue Online, but it was never released. In 2010, Sega announced another spin-off, Shenmue City, a social game for the Yahoo Mobage mobile service; it was shut down in late 2011. In September 2011, Suzuki left Sega to focus on his development studio Ys Net. At the E3 conference on June 15, 2015, he announced a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to develop Shenmue III with Ys Net for PlayStation 4 and Windows having licensed the rights from Sega. The campaign reached its initial $2 million goal in just under nine hours. On July 17, 2015, Shenmue III became the fastest-funded and highest-funded video game project in Kickstarter history, raising $6.3 million in total. It was released on November 19, 2019. == Ports ==

Sega created ports of Shenmue for PlayStation 2 and Xbox, but these went unreleased. The programmer Makoto Wada said this was due to problems with the product placement contract, which only covered the Dreamcast version. A remake of Shenmue and Shenmue II, featuring new models, textures and lighting, was canceled in 2017 due to technical problems. On August 21, 2018, Sega released high-definition ports of Shenmue and Shenmue II for PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One. The ports were developed by the British studio D3T, Some details, such as the product placement, were omitted, and cutscenes were presented in their original aspect ratio due to technical limitations. The ports were released in Japan on November 22, 2018, and debuted at number four on the Japanese charts with 37,529 retail sales on PlayStation 4. They remained among the top 20 bestselling games in Japan until December 2, 2018, having sold almost 45,000 copies. IGN reported numerous bugs affecting graphics, cutscenes, controls and saved games. In 2021, a fan project to remake Shenmue based on the 2018 ports using Unreal Engine 4 was announced. ==Other media==

Sega released a soundtrack album, Shenmue Orchestra Version, on April 1, 1999, before the game's release. A two-disc soundtrack album, Shenmue OST Chapter 1: Yokosuka, was released on March 23, 2000. Data Discs also released a vinyl edition. A compilation of Shenmues cutscenes, Shenmue: The Movie, was released theatrically in Japan in 2001 and packaged with the Xbox version of Shenmue II. An anime adaptation of Shenmue premiered on February 6, 2022. ==Notes==