Oh my god. I think that I’ve read this story about twelve times in the past few days, keeping it on a browser tab on my phone and glancing at it every once in a while. Yu Suzuki spoke at GDC this week and of course, there were tons of questions about Shenmue. In fact, he gave a long talk about the development of Shenmue and Shenmue II. When the topic of Shenmue III came about, Yu was a bit shy about it as we’ve been hearing rumors about it for so many years, including legal disputes and more.
It turns out that Yu Suzuki does kind of have a plan for a possible Shenmue III, a plan inspired by the runaway success that other developers have seen with crowdfunding through stuff like Kickstarter. Don’t get too excited, though, because he’s just looking into it. The original Shenmue games cost somewhere in the ballpark of $70 million to produce at the time, but then again, the precedent for the technology wasn’t there yet. Shenmue was built and researched from the ground up at the time, before the open world 3D RPG existed. Anyway, he’s looking into it.
He’s also working on a project right now, but won’t tell anyone what it is. I’d be upset, but it’s Yu Suzuki and he can do whatever he wants. [Source]
