To celebrate the anniversary of the North American release of Shenmue shenmue dojo has kindly subtitled this one hour japanese tv documentary on the development of shenmue covered over a span of sixth months. Doc shows tons of meetings Suzuki has going over progress and what to fix but a big bonus is not only footage of the game being worked on in development stations but also tons and I do mean tons of unseen beta footage showing very early dobuita and china from shenmue 2. Also interesting how they use latest sony tv's and actually play Final Fantasy 8 at a meeting to see what they are up against competition wise. Kinda get a feeling Sega had a bit of a quirky development environment that is pretty casual with a frat like environment. Really shocked how much of the last disc of shenmue 2 had been completed at this point in development. Meetings are also a bit eye opening with Suzuki being pretty blunt often giving direction while smoking a cigarette. You also witness when they make the decision to split the game in two. Image is pretty clean so beta footage comes out pretty well (including unused QTE dodging forklifts on the docs). Any shenmue fan must watch this. Just click the cc button and choose English, Spanish, Portuagease, French, and German for your desired language.
I've never seen as much of how AM2 worked its magic, and even though I already knew development had progressed to a point where large portions of the eventual sequel were complete before the first game was even finished, it's stunning to see even more footage in such great quality... As well as prototype clips with the same information shown in the Saturn version (using the same font, no less - presumably carried over from the 32-bit code), did I spot a VF3 cabinet with some kind of debug text visible at around the nine minute point?!
