What’s Shenmue?
Part III: The Brief Lives of Shenmue Online & Shenmue City, the Birth of Ys Net, and the Seeds of an Idea
From out of nowhere, in 2004 a PC MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) named Shenmue Online was announced as a joint venture between Sega and a Korean company named JC Entertainment, targeting the booming Korean & Chinese online gaming market. Fans were disheartened, and thanks to this game Shenmue III would become an increasingly unlikely proposition.
Reports came out in August 2005 that Sega Shanghai Software, who was overseeing the project, had stopped checking up on development of the game in March, and that two months later the project had left JC Entertainment for a Taiwanese team. As the Korean company owned half of the intellectual rights of Shenmue Online, a legal battle ensued. An estimated $26 million was spent on the project.
While the game boasted some graphical improvements when it was showcased at the ChinaJoy digital entertainment expo in 2006, with development having been taken over by the Taiwan-based T2CN, this would be the last time the much-maligned title would be seen in public, despite being slated to appear at the following year’s conference. Rumours of its cancellation were never confirmed.
Yu Suzuki’s own career seemed to be similarly cursed. Having left AM2 in July 2003, he set up a new division within Sega tentatively called Cinematic Online Games, renamed Digital Rex that October. A smaller team of 22 compared to the 100-man-plus teams of other Sega division, their first title was revealed in 2005 to be a touch-screen arcade fighter called Psy-Phi and was planned for release the following year. While it was unknown at the time why the game never came to arcades, in 2010 Suzuki revealed that players would hurt their fingers dragging them across the arcade screen. After producing arcade racer Sega Race TV in 2008 which only saw limited release, Suzuki stayed on at Sega in an advisory role for AM2.
“I’m one person playing two roles at this point”,” says Ys Net President Yu Suzuki. “I have my creative side, but I’m also president of the company and have to be a salesman. So the salesman part of me wants to negotiate deals down to a moderate budget to make things happen. But the creative part of me says, ‘I’m Yu Suzuki, and I’m going to make it this good, so you should pay this amount.’
To be honest, that’s not always an easy thing to balance.”
While still at Sega, in 2008 Suzuki founded his own company, Ys Net, and on the 7th of October 2010 they announced their first title, a mobile game called シェンムー街, alternatively translated as Shenmue World, Shenmue Town and Shenmue City. Having been in beta since the 21st of September, in the same press release it was also revealed that a PC browser-based port was in the works for the Japanese market, though it never saw release.
Published by SunSoft, most famous for their games in the 16-bit era with awesome soundtracks, Shenmue City was released in Japan in December on the DeNA Yahoo! Mobage network. Speaking with Famitsu in November 2010, Suzuki revealed he conceived the idea of a mobile game after noticing the popularity of social games such as Mafia Wars. Regarding why he chose the Shenmue property in particular, Suzuki responded “Shenmue has the image of grand scale,” said Suzuki. “But making something of grand scale requires appropriate preparation. I want to make 3 with the same volume as in the past. There have actually been a lot of requests from fans for 3 as well. There were even petitions signed by by tens of thousands of people. I wanted to carry out my obligations for the series.”
In a June 2011 interview with GamaSutra, Suzuki said the game was conceived with multiple platforms in mind and wished to bring Shenmue City to smartphones. Asked about how he could use licenses for his old games, Suzuki claimed he had to “negotiate with Sega on a one-by-one basis with that sort of thing.”
Shenmue City ceased operating on the 26th of December 2011. Ys Net would release two Virtua Fighter smartphone games in 2011 and 2014. After having been appointed as advisor and executive producer for video game development at Premium Agency in June 2011, a free-to-play pirate shooter iOS/Android game called Gan! Gan! Kaizokudan (Gan! Gan! Pirates) was announced the following June, for release in September 2012. This would be Suzuki’s only original title since leaving Sega; never short on ideas but always short on funding, concepts such as an MMORPG called Pure Breed featuring pets and their owners along with alligator taxis would never come to fruition.
It’s easier to make decisions in small companies, but with less money available. Big companies have funding, but their management are afraid to take risks. I think the best way is to work in companies of medium capacity. My dream is a small company with a huge business investment. Then we have both the money and the liberty to decide on things.
Shenmue fans were used to disappointment. Compounding their misery were false rumours around E3 and TGS every year that Shenmue III would be announced. The most notorious of these was an article on the 23rd of August 2005 from a relatively unknown gaming website called Kikizo. They claimed that not only was Shenmue III coming, but that it was already completed and awaiting a deal for release for either the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3, or Nintendo’s console codenamed “Revolution” (this would later become the Wii). Kikizo’s “sources” said Suzuki had little to do with the project, and that its release was contingent on both an exclusivity deal for one system and also the release of the previous two games for that platform.
Two years later on the 1st of August 2007, the author of this article, Adam Doree, offered a mea culpa to the Shenmue community, claiming it was irresponsible to run such a piece without being able to name a source or offer any evidence. Regarding the possibility of Shenmue III, all Doree had to say was:
“As for Shenmue, I would have to say at this stage, it is worth forgetting about. If all the fans get any rich relatives together and channel it [through the fan website Shenmue Dojo] perhaps we could buy rights, hire Suzuki (he’d likely say yes) and independently make the game under license from Sega at no risk to them. That is the only way it will get made at this stage I think.”
At GDC 2011, after being asked about Shenmue III yet again, Suzuki declared that Sega would most likely let him make the game, but that he just needed to secure funding. During an interview held with “Kenji” from French fan site Shenmue-Master.fr at the Toulouse Games Show in November that year, stated that he believed that he could obtain the license from Sega.
Following this, in February 2012 fan sites Shenmue-UK.com and Shenmue500K joined forces to form TeamYu and launched the #GiveYuTheShenmueLicense campaign, where on the 3rd of every month fans would tweet their support for Yu Suzuki’s efforts to make Shenmue III, with the first tweetathon on the 3rd of March.
On the 11th of May 2012, Ryan Payton’s mobile stealth game République was successfully funded after a month-long Kickstarter campaign. Not long after, he discussed Kickstarter with Yu Suzuki, which was the first he had heard of the crowdfunding website. The possibility excited Suzuki, but he knew that it would not be enough to make the worthy sequel that he wished to create.
Soon after, Cedric Biscay and his Monaco-based Shibuya Productions would make a deal with Suzuki and Ys Net to provide the bulk of investment for Shenmue III. Furthermore, seeking an exclusivity deal with one of the Big Three console manufacturers would be lucrative. But the fact remained that Sega still held the rights (in a post-E3 2015 interview, Biscay hinted that this was the the biggest obstacle).
To some it seemed that having released Shenmue II for the original Xbox, Microsoft should fund the sequel for its latest console. On the 4th of December 2013, in response to a fan’s tweet regarding Shenmue III for Xbox One, Microsoft’s Phil Spencer admitted “I like Shenmue as well but it’s a Sega IP. MS Studios doesn’t have much pull at Sega. I’ll recommend to our 3rd party team.” In a second tweet on the matter on the 1st of February 2014 Spencer lamented that “I know there is lots of Shenmue love out there, but it’s a Sega game, we can’t build it.” Despite acknowledging that it was the biggest request he got from Xbox gamers in an interview the following month, it became clear to many that Shenmue III would not be coming to a Microsoft console.
Meanwhile, fans remained undeterred in their efforts to make Shenmue III a reality. In a Q&A session with Suzuki at the Monaco Anime Game Show on the 3rd of March 2013, unaware of his meetings and discussions with Ryan Payton on the matter, French fan Sebastien-Abdelhamid asked Suzuki if he had thought of crowdfunding Shenmue III. When he replied that there might be such a possibility, murmuring while wryly smiling, fans on the Internet spoke of nothing else for months to come.
While talks with Microsoft ultimately proved fruitless, inroads were being made at Sony. Suzuki had been friends with Mark Cerny, lead architect for the PS4, since Cerny’s day at Sega working on games such as Sonic the Hedgehog 2. The two appeared together at GDC 2011 where Suzuki received a Pioneer Award after giving a career retrospective presentation. Regarding Shenmue III, all Suzuki had to say was “I think [Sega] is going to let me make it… it is just up to the budget.”
Two years later at the March 2013 GDC, a photo of the two together was tweeted by the conference’s general manager…
August 2013 saw Sony’s Third Party Production team, headed by Gio Corsi, commence #BuildingTheList, where fans would tweet Corsi what third-party game they would most like to see for PS4. From day one, the answer was clear: Shenmue III.
January 2014, Corsi got a call from Adam Boyes of Developer & Publisher Relations; Suzuki wanted to meet with them. Even within Sony the project to bring Shenmue III to PS4 was known only to a few, referred to in meetings by the codenames “Ebisu” (a district in Tokyo) and “Ramen” (Corsi’s favourite food).
After a fake filing for a Shenmue trademark in November 2013, news came out the following February that Sega had lost the the trademark for the name in the US; while some were hopeful that this would give Suzuki free reign to do what he liked with the franchise, others pointed out that this only concerned the name “Shenmue”, and Sega still owned the property rights. A renewal of this trademark in May led to hopes that they would present something at E3 2014, but another E3 passed with no Shenmue news.
March 2014, and Suzuki appeared at GDC once again with Mark Cerny, this time giving a Shenmue post-mortem. Since the presentation was announced the previous November, many hoped that there would be news of Shenmue III. While fans were happy to gain new insights into the history of the development of their beloved game even after all this time, when asked the question on everyone’s minds, Suzuki merely replied that he would still like to make Shenmue III. Unbeknownst to everyone, Boyes and Corsi would meet with Suzuki for the first time at the conference, discussing how Sony’s Third Party Productions could help Ys Net. Further meetings between them were held at E3 and TGS that year, and talk turned to what the funding goal should be for a potential Kickstarter. While Suzuki wanted to aim high, the Sony guys felt they had to be realistic, and eventually they agreed on an initial demand of $2 million.
Despite a constant barrage of tweets and messages from fans demanding their help in saving Shenmue, the only clue Boyes gave was a tweet in June 2014 that “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Suzuki himself, though, gave a little hint that things may be in motion at Gamelab in June 2014…
After an audience member asked about whether he had considered crowdfunding, assuring Suzuki it would meet with great success, he replied that they were in the process of seeing how viable it would be. When posed the question again in a post-conference interview, Suzuki claimed he had dinner with Keiji Inafune, whose Mighty No. 9 was successfully funded on Kickstarter in September 2013, and they had discussed the subject. More and more it seemed, demand started to grow from fans for the opportunity to crowdfund the game they had been dreaming of for more than a decade.
When asked about Shenmue at the PlayStation Experience event that December, Gio Corsi confided to a few fans that Shenmue was indeed their number one request, but that there were issues with the rights to the series, even for ports of the first two to modern systems (as of writing, Shenmue and Shenmue II have still not seen release for PC or PS4). Concerning the first two games, a NeoGAF poster claimed that there was confusion regarding a defunct company which licensed technology used for the Shenmue engine, and as a consequence Sega deciding it to be too much of a legal headache to consider re-releasing them.
Undeterred by Sega’s apathy towards HD ports of the Dreamcast Shenmue games, a Korean fan referring to himself as “Noconkid”/“Kid Nocon” released a video in August 2014 of his own efforts to remake Shenmue’s Dobuita in Unreal Engine 3. The response for his efforts was overwhelmingly positive from the Shenmue community. Despite Kid Nocon releasing a few more videos by November, it was clear that such a monumental task would take years of work for an individual.
Even in 2015 there were still those who went to considerable length to fake news of an upcoming Shenmue III. The image below was “leaked” in May, claiming that Sega was collaborating with Final Fantasy developers to release the game along with updated versions of the first two. Some fans pointed out the jacket was a stock Photoshop asset, and so this rumour was quickly debunked.
On the 26th of May, Suzuki returned to Twitter after a year-long absence. Posting a photo of him reunited with his Bajiquan Grand Master Wu, his next few tweets were fairly innocuous: a photo of one of his three Yorkshire terriers, some snaps of Showa-era architecture in Ebisu (in hindsight, a nod perhaps to both the Sony codename for Shenmue III and the Showa setting of the series), and a pet terrapin named “Jumbo”. A tweet on the 11th of June of Fremont Street showed he was in Las Vegas leading up to the days before E3 in LA, but on the 14th, the eve of Sony’s conference, Suzuki gave one last clue…
