– Game industry veteran Yu Suzuki recalls creating Shenmue with a huge team working off a giant Excel list of “action items.” Yu Suzuki, the influential Japanese game designer famously known for his work at Sega, took the stage at GDC 2014 to deliver a Classic Game Postmortem talk about his iconic Dreamcast game Shenmue. Suzuki — who currently serves as president of his own studio YsNet — spoke at length for the very first time about the creation of Shenmue, now considered a cult classic nonlinear game. Beginning with the game’s humble origin as a Sega Saturn RPG based on Virtua Fighter, he walked the audience through the long journey of the game’s development that led to its ultimate release in 1999 on the Sega Dreamcast. Mark Cerny, game designer and lead system architect for PlayStation 4, was on hand to translate Suzuki’s presentation into English for the audience. We’ve gone ahead and embedded that translated version of Yu Suzuki’s “Classic Game Postmortem: Shenmue” above, but you can also watch it here on the GDC Vault. If you prefer to listen to Suzuki speak in his native Japanese, you can watch an untranslated version of his talk here.
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