New Series: Yu Suzuki's Research Trip to China Part 1 | Kazunari Uchida's Blog Post Translation

In the early 1990s, Yu Suzuki spent two weeks in China gathering material for his upcoming Virtua Fighter II game, and his findings also greatly influenced his creation of Shenmue. In this first part of a new series, Phantom River Stone has translated blog posts by the person who accompanied Yu on this journey.

Today's post topic was selected by Phantom River Stone patrons in our monthly poll for a topic suggestion for the month of July. 

In the year 1994*, Yu Suzuki made a trip to China to research and gather material that had a direct impact on his creation of the Virtua Fighter games, and also on his later concept for "Virtua Fighter RPG" which eventually came to be known as Shenmue.

*Note: a correction has been made to the year. Originally this was stated as 1993, based on sources such as Yu Suzuki's GDC 2014 talk and corroborated by the online biography of Kazunari Uchida who accompanied him. However, articles in issues of the Japanese Beep! MegaDrive at the time confirm that the year the trip took place was 1994.

To date there has not been a lot of information available about this trip. Yu has made mention of this trip during presentations, notably his talk on Shenmue at the 2014 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco at which he shared photos of some of the places visited. Then during my investigation for this article, I came across some posts on a personal blog that were written by the person that Yu made the trip together with - and who later worked with him on the actual Shenmue project: a man by the name of Kazunari Uchida.

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