“What’s the Story With Shenmue?”, 2020-11-23 (; backlinks; similar):
Shenmue itself invites bigger questions. Where exactly is it going after three massive games? Did it really put Sega out of the game console business? Why does it have a fanbase devoted enough to revive it with a $7.78$62015 million Kickstarter? Aren’t the games really just about frittering away an afternoon? And why is Shenmue getting an anime adaptation now, of all times?
Sega wasn’t having the best decade by 1996. Their Saturn console, while a success in Japan, was stumbling internationally and being rapidly eclipsed by Sony’s PlayStation in the world of fancy new 3D games. Yet Sega had done well in arcades, and much of that was due to a producer named Yu Suzuki. Sega’s biggest arcade hits of the 1980s, from OutRun to After Burner to Space Harrier, all came about thanks to Suzuki. His home-run streak had continued into the 1990s with Daytona USA, Virtua Cop, and Virtua Fighter, the last of which proved a runaway success…
…the project became an original game called Shenmue. Instead of a traditional dungeons-and-battles RPG, it aimed to build a sprawling 3D world for players to explore as they guided a young man named Ryo in his quest to track down his father’s killer…Much of these options are commonplace in today’s open-world games, but in the late 1990s it was madly ambitious—and expensive.
Sega gave Suzuki unprecedented scope with his new project, banking on his skill with arcade games. Such carte blanche is common among studios and film directors; John Boorman used the success of Deliverance to greenlight the bizarre, underrated fantasy Zardoz, while Andrew Stanton parlayed his accomplishments with Pixar films into a massive John Carter of Mars movie. But never before had a game company bet so heavily on one creator’s vision. Years later, localizer Jeremy Blaustein compared Shenmue to another notorious tale of Hollywood excess: Michael Cimino, fresh from scoring Oscars with The Deer Hunter, ran up such a huge bill with his indulgent western Heaven’s Gate that it bankrupted the entire United Artists studio.
Shenmue’s budget remains in debate: some sources placed it at $133.83$701999 million, while Suzuki himself estimated it closer to $89.86$471999 million. In either case, it was the most expensive video game of its day, eclipsing Final Fantasy VII’s already staggering $86.04$451999 million price tag. In some respects, the cost was inevitable when making a fully-realized 3D world, but spending ran reckless in other departments. As Blaustein recalls, Suzuki made extravagant choices even in localizing the game. Common practice was to record English dialogue in America with experienced voice actors, but Suzuki required the game’s English version to be recorded in Japan—and for Ryo, his demi-girlfriend Nozomi, and other lead characters to be voiced by actors who partly resembled them. Forced to cast hundreds of roles with a limited pool of English-speaking actors in Japan, Blaustein had to fly voice talent from the US to Japan for the recording sessions, and even then the actors had to make do with an already-translated script that left no time for rewrites.
Shenmue was bound for financial failure even before its release. The Dreamcast had more traction than the Saturn, but it still wasn’t as big as the PlayStation. In a 2015 retrospective, Games Radar estimated that Shenmue would’ve been a success only if each and every Dreamcast owner had bought the game twice at full price…As Shenmue took a break, the game industry moved on, frequently following Shenmue’s path. Grand Theft Auto III brought its carjacking and violence into a fully 3D world of side attractions and player freedom. Action games like Resident Evil 4 integrated Quick Time Events. And Sega started up Shenmue’s most obvious descendant with the Yakuza series.