Hey guys, does anyone else know that Shenmue was supposed to be a roleplaying game on the Saturn? Does anyone else know more information about this?
In case @Anthaemia. isn't tired of explaining this I think she would be one of the best sources of info on this site. Hopefully this tag isn't annoying.
You rang? There isn't much that Yu Suzuki didn't personally cover in his GDC postmortem, though I will add a few minor details I've compiled from various sources over the years... First of all, development of the Saturn prototype supposedly lasted 18 months in total, with the platform switched to Dreamcast - or Katana, as it was then still known - in mid 1997. Incredibly, it didn't make use of any hardware upgrade, and nor did either documented revision of Saturn Virtua Fighter 3, for that matter. To this day, it's possible to visit archived copies of AM2's old Japanese website from around the end of '96 and find reference to something called Virtua AD, which first showed up around the same time they also officially announced Fighters Megamix, Digital Dance Mix and that work on a Saturn conversion of VF3 had gone into production. (As a side note, I'd love for footage of the Power Up conference where all these were revealed in November '96 to finally surface, assuming the event was filmed.) From what I can remember, Virtua AD was the earliest known public working title for what became Shenmue, though it was previously referred to Virtua RPG and later Akira's Quest internally. Even in the final version, you can find remnants of its heritage as something directly connected to the VF universe, including a handful of cut scenes that are frame-for-frame remakes of sequences from that franchise's animated series. At some point following this, it was decided to make Shenmue a standalone experience that went on to be split into multiple installments. Before his vision for the franchise changed, Yu Suzuki had also been considering further interactive side stories based on characters from VF, such as Chicago, which was to be an action game designed to give background to the Bryant siblings, Jacky and Sarah. Before this project was cancelled, a short pre-rendered clip of Jacky tearing through Rome in his red supercar found its way onto a Cinepak demo for the Saturn. Later, the same footage reappeared as the attract screen for SCUD Race Plus. My understanding is that Chicago was then resurrected as the next AM2 title put into development after VF4, only for its best ideas to be spread over two very different arcade projects: one was Virtua Cop 3, and the other became Out Run 2. According to someone at Sega who I once spoke to, it's believed that Yu Suzuki personally abandoned the third-person concept of Chicago once and for all when he learned of a rival's plans for a similar spin-off. While some journalists reported this as being Namco's Death By Degrees, which expands on Nina from Tekken, that game didn't surface until 2005, so my guess is that AM2 scrapped its own project because of The Bouncer from 2000, since that was designed and co-directed by Seichi Ishii, who previously worked on several AM2 titles before joining Namco then going on establish DreamFactory. Either way, you may also recall the previous reference to Chicago in VF2, where it serves as the name for the background music that plays on the city arena whenever Sarah and Jacky face each other. P.S. Sorry for likely boring many of you! That was a far longer response than I'd originally intended to write, confirming that I'll probably never tire of this topic.
Is the search function on this website broken still or something? Either way, thanks for taking the time to write the info again, Anthaemia. Always an interesting read.
