Shenmue III Broke Kickstarter and I Have Been Useless At Work All Week

Okay so E3 happened last week and yes, Fallout 4 looks great, and yes, everyone's still losing their minds over Final Fantasy VII getting a remake. Every gaming site on the internet has that covered six ways from Sunday already, so I'm not going to pile on. What I actually want to talk about is the thing that happened at Sony's press conference on Monday that made me put my coffee down and just stare at the TV for a solid ten seconds: Yu Suzuki walked out on stage and announced Shenmue III.

I need to explain why this matters to me specifically, because if you're under about 28 you probably have no idea what Shenmue even is.

Back in 1999 I had a Sega Dreamcast, one of maybe three kids at my school who did, and Shenmue was this insane, sprawling, open-world game about a guy named Ryo hunting down his father's killer in a fictional Japanese town, except you could also open every drawer in his house and check the weather and go bowling. It felt like nothing else at the time, mostly because it basically wasn't anything else at the time. Shenmue II came out in 2001 (Dreamcast in Europe and Japan, Xbox in the US, which is its own weird bit of gaming history) and ended on a cliffhanger so abrupt it's practically a meme at this point. Ryo just walks off toward a guy named Shenhua and the credits roll. That was fourteen years ago. FOURTEEN.

So when the Kickstarter page went live Monday night with a two million dollar goal, I did not hesitate, I threw my card at it before I'd even finished reading the tiers. Apparently I wasn't alone — I heard from a few different write-ups that it crossed a million dollars in something like twelve minutes, and hit the full two million goal in under five hours. That's reportedly the fastest a game has ever hit a million on Kickstarter, full stop. As of today it's sitting well past three million and climbing, with new stretch goals unlocking almost daily (more towns, a bigger world, a battle rally minigame nobody asked for but everyone wants now that it's an option).

A couple of things worth flagging if you're thinking about backing it yourself. It's PS4 and PC only, no Xbox, which has predictably caused some grumbling in comment sections, and Sony clearly had a hand in making this happen behind the scenes given they used their own press conference slot to launch someone else's Kickstarter. I don't love that a "crowdfunded" game had that much corporate scaffolding under it before a single backer opened their wallet, honestly. It's not really the scrappy indie-revival story it's being sold as. But I backed it anyway at the $60 tier because fourteen years is fourteen years and I am not a strong person.

If you want to back it, the page is straightforward: go to Kickstarter, search Shenmue 3, pick a tier. The $29 tier gets you a digital copy, $60 gets a boxed copy when it ships (they're saying late 2017, which, sure, we'll see), and there are collector's tiers running up past $100 with art books and soundtrack discs if that's your thing. I'd say don't go past what you'd pay for a normal game unless you really care, because the stretch goal stuff is fun to read about but nothing on that page is guaranteed until it's actually in your hands.

Anyway I dug my old Dreamcast out of a box in the closet this weekend to see if it still worked (it does, miraculously, the disc drive still reads about half the time which for a machine older than some of my coworkers is honestly impressive) and I've been replaying the original all week instead of doing literally anything productive. My backlog of actual current-gen games is just sitting there judging me.

Two million dollars in five hours for a franchise that's been dead since the Bush administration is a genuinely wild thing to watch happen in real time. I don't think I've felt like this about a game announcement since, well, probably the last time Suzuki was on a stage talking about this exact game.