I still have a Sega Dreamcast in a box in my closet. It doesn't work anymore, the laser died on the GD-ROM drive sometime around 2009 and I never got around to fixing it, mostly because fixing it means opening the thing up and I am, historically, bad at putting cases back together without a leftover screw. But I kept it, because it had Shenmue on it, and Shenmue was the game that convinced seventeen-year-old me that video games could be about something other than jumping on stuff.
So when Yu Suzuki walked out on stage at Sony's E3 press conference this past Monday and said the words "Shenmue 3," I did the thing I swore off after two separate crowdfunded gadgets showed up over a year late and slightly worse than promised. I backed a Kickstarter before I'd even finished reading the pitch page.
I wasnt alone, not even close. The campaign hit its $2 million goal in something like four hours, while the press conference was technically still happening a few feet away. By the next morning it had become the fastest Kickstarter project ever to cross $1 million, and Ive seen a couple different numbers floating around for exactly how many hours that took, which tells you how chaotic that first day was for everyone trying to track it in real time. Last time I refreshed the page it had cleared four million dollars with almost a month still left on the clock, and it wasnt slowing down by much.
Heres the thing though. Im genuinely happy this is happening and Im also a little uneasy about it, and I dont think those two feelings cancel each other out.
The uneasy part is that Shenmue 2 came out in 2001. Fourteen years is a long time for a team, a studio, an entire industry to change, and "the guy who made the first two games is personally involved again" isnt the same guarantee it wouldve been in 2003. Suzuki hasnt directed a mainline console game in over a decade. The ask ($2 million, now blown way past) is tiny by modern RPG standards too. Fallout 4, announced at that same E3 a day earlier, almost certainly has a budget dozens of times the size. Im not saying money automatically buys quality. Im saying its worth sitting with the fact that the last time a beloved director got fan money and full creative control to finish something long-unfinished, backers of a certain other famous adventure game (not naming names, you already know the one) waited a good three years past the original delivery estimate to actually play it.
The happy part is dumber and simpler. I want to walk around Guilin again. I want to pet the cat by the arcade and get yelled at by a shopkeeper for wasting daylight, again. Shenmue was never really about the combat or the pacing for me, it was about that specific feeling of being a stranger in a town that didnt care whether you existed, checking a made up weather forecast for no reason, standing around waiting for a shop to open at ten. Nothing since has quite replicated that boredom-as-atmosphere thing, and Ive gone looking for it in a lot of open world games at this point.
A few people in comment sections elsewhere have been grumbling that Sony should have just funded this outright instead of crowdfunding it. Honestly, yeah, probably. Sony put its own E3 stage time behind the announcement and its still asking fans to write the check themselves. Thats a little cynical coming from a company that size. But Im not mad enough about it to ask for my backer money back, and clearly neither are the roughly seventy thousand other people who pledged this week.
If it ships in 2017 looking like a slightly sharper version of a 2001 game, Ill be fine with that outcome. If it ships years late and its a mess, Ill have said I saw it coming, and I wont enjoy being right about it. Either way Im keeping the broken Dreamcast in the closet a while longer. Feels wrong to finally toss it now, of all weeks.