In this post, we continue our English translation of Famitsu’s 25th anniversary roundtable with the original Shenmue developers. In Part 3, the group discussed Hirai’s “Shenmue Maker” system, the unique team culture under Yu Suzuki, and the creative energy that fueled the project’s breakthroughs.
Part 4 explores Shenmue’s lasting impact on the developers’ lives and the wider industry - and, casually dropped into the conversation, comes the revelation that a fully functional PlayStation 2 port was developed but never released!
Shenmue's Pivotal Role in the Developers' Lives
Okayasu: I think Shenmue really changed the lives of a lot of the people who worked on it.
—A lot of staff came and went during its development. How did all of you feel about that constant turnover?
Okayasu: It was honestly just a "throw more people at it" kind of strategy - pure manpower tactics. And that meant some of the new staff were competent, but others were completely useless.
Kasahara: We had people coming in as "programmers" who had never even written a line of code. It was total chaos. There were even people whose only job was to go out and recruit others. Their performance was judged by how many people they brought in - once they delivered someone, their job was done.
—Ahhh... so the whole staffing and operational system was unstructured, and individual tasks didn’t necessarily add up to meaningful progress overall.
Matsuda: Which made things a nightmare for those of us actually on the ground.
Okayasu: Matsuda, what did you think when you got caught up in what we called the "Shenmue Hunt" and you were told to join the Shenmue team?
Matsuda: Oh, I didn’t even get a say in whether I joined the team or not. It wasn’t optional. I still clearly remember that it was right before my very first summer vacation as a new graduate.
Before joining the Shenmue team, I was thinking, “Wow, AM2 really works hard. Pretty intense,” but I figured I’d take a nice break over summer and refresh myself. Then, right before the break, my manager called me in and said (doing an impression), “Matsuda… there’s this game called Shenmue. We’re short on people. The time has come for your talents to be of use. You want to grow as a designer, don’t you?”
And the moment I said, “Yes!” my summer vacation disappeared.
Everyone: (laughs)
Kasahara: That voice impression was actually kind of close. (laughs)
Matsuda: From that moment on, I was part of the Shenmue development team. It was brutal: what we might spend two or three weeks on now, we had to crank out in about three days back then. But like my manager said, it really did help me grow as a designer. (laughs)
Wada: Around that time, we also started bringing in more programmers. The team just kept growing.
Okayasu: Yeah, and even folks like Toshihiro Nagoshi* - the guy behind Super Monkey Ball - were involved back then. He was with Amusement Vision, one of Sega’s internal development studios, and some of their staff joined the Shenmue project too.
*Note from Switch: See our previous post in which a senior director at Sega talks about Nagoshi's Involvement with Shenmue's Release, in which Nagoshi was tasked with bringing Shenmue's development to an end.
—Really?
Okayasu: So in the end, this development that brought in an enormous number of people still had to be wrapped up. But Yu-san is the type who always believes, “We can still make it better!” He kept throwing out new ideas, and I had to constantly stop him, telling him, “Please, do nothing!”
Wada: Ah, that reminds me of the final stretch of Shenmue II’s development. We were already done, burning the final master ROM, and in the middle of the night, Yu-san contacted me saying, “Hey, so I was thinking... could we maybe tweak this part a bit?” (laughs) I had to stop him like, “What are you talking about!? We're literally burning the master ROM right now!” He just couldn’t leave it alone.
Okayasu: Right, but that's just how he is. He clings to the idea of making things more interesting until the very end.
Hirai: And it wasn’t just with Shenmue II. That happened with Chapter One as well. (laughs)
Okayasu: And with III too! (laughs)
Miyawaki: In the end, it always comes back to Yu-san. Everyone who came together for Shenmue was, in a way, gathered for his sake. It was like we were soldiers assembled to defeat the Demon King - that Demon King being Yu-san. Though, of course, Yu-san isn't evil or anything! (laughs) But the development team really came together to "clear" the project.
Hirai: Earlier, we talked about how Mr. Kasahara and Mr. Okayasu acted as buffers between the team and Yu-san. But honestly, every time we went for a drink or a mahjong game, Yu-san would always pull me aside and say, “Hey Hirai, there’s something I want to try...” So I eventually learned that every time I went to those outings, my workload was about to increase. (laughs)
Matsuda: So many people were involved with Shenmue that they’re now scattered all over the place. Honestly, with some of them, we’re not entirely sure what they actually did. (laughs)
Miyawaki: I've worked in all sorts of industries, not just in games, and I've run into so many self-proclaimed "Shenmue staff members" and fake "Shenmue developers" over the years. (laughs)
Hirai: Oh yeah, definitely! I've personally met four people who said, "Actually, I was the main programmer on Shenmue." And I’d be thinking to myself, “Pretty sure that was me…” (laughs)
Matsuda: Saying that to you, of all people, is pretty wild. (laughs)
Hirai: I’d just play dumb and go, “Wow, that’s impressive! So how did you make that game, exactly?” (laughs) I mean, if Wada-san said it, sure, I'd understand! But these were people I’d never even seen before.
Miyawaki: I also met someone once who claimed to have done character design for Shenmue, but in reality, they just touched on some display-related work briefly and were gone before we knew it.
Kasahara: That kind of thing happened a lot! So when someone like that pops up, we’d all start reaching out to each other in the Shenmue network like, “Hey, this guy says he worked on Shenmue. Is he legit?” (laughs)
—So there's that many “fake Shenmue staff members” floating around the industry...?
Wada: Setting the game content aside, as engineers, there were practically no other people in Japan, or anywhere, really, who could implement a game like that on the Dreamcast. To pull off that kind of visual fidelity on that hardware... If you tell someone in the industry you were part of Shenmue, you're practically guaranteed to land a job.
Okayasu: And it's true that Shenmue was made by a lot of incredibly talented people. I worked on Shenmue III too, but when I tried to gather people with the same kind of skills and mindset as on Shenmue I and II, it was tough. You just don't come across that kind of talent easily anymore.
—Shenmue is often cited as a pioneer of the open-world genre, known for introducing many groundbreaking gameplay and technical elements. Do you personally feel that way?
Hirai: QTEs are an easy example, right? The concept itself existed back in the LaserDisc game era, but what we did was evolve it: integrating it into modern gameplay, like during movie-like cutscenes or high-action sequences to keep tension high. That approach was later adopted by a lot of other games.
Kurooka: From a technical perspective, the character lip-syncing was a major innovation too. At the time, Shenmue was the first 3D game to use a tool called “Clipper” to analyze voice data and match the mouth movements to vowel sounds. That eventually evolved into what we now call “lip-syncing,” and I’ve heard that the same idea spread to many other games later on.
Wada: Nowadays, those kinds of features might seem standard, but back then, hardly anyone was doing them. For example, the mouth movements had three levels of openness (small, medium, and large) which made the motion feel more human.
Hirai: Mouth movement systems did exist at the time, but what was revolutionary for us was adding realism. For example, with a sound like "ma", the lips close before making the sound. That small detail added a sense of naturalness. And... well, I was the one who suggested that, by the way.
Okayasu: There he goes again, claiming credit! (laughs)
—But seriously, when you realize that kind of detail was being implemented 25 years ago, it's pretty amazing. It may be hard to pinpoint the very first example, but it seems likely that Shenmue was one of the earliest to have a general-purpose lip sync system in a 3D game.
Hirai: Oh, that reminds me: we actually once created a PlayStation 2 version of Shenmue Chapter One. It was never released, but internally, we had a working PS2 build of it. We also developed an Xbox version, but only Shenmue II was released in North America.
—Wait, there was a PS2 version of Shenmue!?
Wada: It never made it to market, but yeah, we had a port.
Hirai: We had to rewrite the assembly language source code. Converting it back into C was a major effort.
Wada: As for the Xbox version, Chapter One was never released, but not because of technical reasons. It was more about licensing. See, we had product tie-ins, like the TIMEX watch and Coca-Cola drinks, and those agreements were only valid for the Dreamcast version of Chapter One. That might be why it was shelved for other platforms.
—Was the PS2 version in a state that could actually be played?
Hirai: Yes, it ran. We reworked the graphics systems and everything was fully playable.
Wada: On the Dreamcast, the shaders were fixed-function, but with the PlayStation 2, we had to implement the shader effects manually through programming. The GPU architecture between the Dreamcast and PS2 was fundamentally different, so we rebuilt and implemented that as well. If we had decided to release it, it would have been totally feasible from a game development standpoint.
—Wow...
To be continued in Part Five!
Source: Famitsu.com – Shenmue 25th Anniversary Roundtable (Japanese) (December 2024)
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