So I was up way later than I should've been last night, which if you follow this blog even loosely is not exactly a rare confession. Sony's E3 press conference ran long, my coffee had gone cold two hours before it started, and somewhere around the Shenmue III reveal I did something I try really hard not to do during a live show: I opened a new tab and pledged money to a Kickstarter before the trailer had even finished.
I don't really regret it. But I want to talk about the number, because the number is the actual story here, more than the reveal itself.
Shenmue III's campaign went live basically the second Yu Suzuki walked off stage, with a $2 million goal. I checked back about twenty minutes later out of curiosity and it had already cleared six figures. By the time I actually dragged myself to bed it was sitting well past the goal, and this morning it's sitting even further past that, which as far as I can tell makes it the fastest a video game project has ever hit seven figures on that platform. Under a day. For a franchise whose last mainline entry came out in 2001 and ended on a cliffhanger involving a guy named Ren and a boat, which nobody who wasn't already a die-hard fan has thought about in roughly a decade.
That's the part that gets me. This wasn't a new IP with slick marketing behind it. It's a fourteen-year-old cliffhanger that a few hundred thousand people apparently never stopped thinking about, myself included, and the second there was an actual path to a resolution, the money just showed up. I backed Shenmue III at the tier that gets you a digital copy plus your name in a thank-you reel nobody will scroll to, $75, which is more than I've ever put into a crowdfunding campaign and also more than I'd normally spend on a game I haven't seen five minutes of gameplay for. I've been burned by this before too - I backed a peripheral thing back in 2013 that shipped eighteen months late and then barely worked, so it's not like I go into these blind. I just decided I didn't care this time.
The rest of Sony's conference is going to get plenty of coverage elsewhere today so I won't do the full rundown, but I do want to flag one other moment because it didn't get nearly the same reaction and probably deserves more: they showed actual gameplay footage of The Last Guardian. Not a logo, not a teaser, actual controllable footage of the giant griffin-cat-bird thing climbing around a ruin. That project has been in some kind of limbo since 2009, to the point where a lot of people, myself included, had quietly assumed it was dead. Seeing it move on screen again was genuinely stranger than the Shenmue announcement, in a good way. I don't fully trust it's coming out on any timeline they'd actually commit to, but I'll take "still alive" over silence.
Also, briefly, because it happened earlier in the week and I don't want it to get totally buried under the Sony stuff: Bethesda finally gave Fallout 4 a release date at their own conference Sunday night, November 10th. I already know I'm not going to get anything done that week. I say this every time a big open-world game gets a date and then I say it again a year later having learned nothing.
Nintendo's digital event is later this morning and I'm sure I'll have opinions about that too, but I wanted to get this down while the Kickstarter tab is still open in my browser and the number is still climbing every time I refresh it, because that's the part that feels worth writing down before it turns into just another line in a "here's everything from E3" recap post. Fourteen years is a long time to wait for a sequel. I'm curious whether the actual game, whenever it shows up, can possibly live up to how good this one night felt.