Written by Brian Lelas  on July 21, 2011

Specials: Our epic retrospective on Yu Suzuki, legendary game designer responsible for Shenmue, Virtua Fighter and so much more.

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He codenamed the new game after Berkley University, a place he loved. The word УBerkleyФ itself had a mystical sound to him, something we wanted to portray with his new epic title and so the codename stuck and word of the Virtua Fighter RPG had shifted forever. In the early stages of Project Berkley, Yu-san was very busy with Virtua Fighter 3, which had taken his 3D fighting game and expanded upon it once again with a new УEvadeФ button, which allowed players to take intuitive steps into the background or foreground of the screen, making the 3D more controllable. The addition was a big hit with fans and was kept throughout the series to date. All of 1996 and 1997 was spent on Virtua Fighter 3 and its follow-up, Virtua Fighter 3 Team Battle (VF3tb for short). AM2 were quietly working away on something special. Project Berkley was evolving. A video was put together and shown only to press. The Sega Saturn build of the game was progressing well and this mysterious video was the evidence of it. The video showed up for public viewing a long time later. At the time, it was extremely impressive.



The international videogame press were in love with Project Berkley and it was mentioned in more magazines than any other game in 1997. As work accelerated on the project it was clear that there was no way that the Saturn would do the game justice. AM2 switched development of the game to Sega's secret console, known at the time as Dural, after the Virtua Fighter character, before being codenamed Naomi and finally revealed as the legendary Sega Dreamcast. Yu Suzuki had a certain degree of influence in what the actual Dreamcast hardware would consist of so that Project Berkley could be made to his specifications. That was how confident Sega were that the game would be a masterpiece.

With his writing of the story of Berkley all but finished, Yu-san finally got the all-clear from Ferrari to develop a revolutionary arcade game entirely based on their new supercar, the F355. AM2 were already playing around with the idea of perceptive screen technology and multi-screen cabinets, but now had a definite focus. Their first arcade game in 3 years surfaced in 1999 just before the North American launch of the Dreamcast. Ferrari F355 Challenge, Yu Suzuki's gift to arcade players who shared his dream of driving a Ferrari, was released worldwide. The game cabinet was enormous. It came with three screens and required new hardware known as the Naomi system, which got its name from early builds of the Dreamcast technology. Yu Suzuki again had personal input into the design of the system and concluded that the only way to make his ambitious three screen game, was to link up four Naomi boards at once. In today's terms, this would be like farming together four super high-end PCs to run a game from the distant future.

Yu Suzuki was so clever in his design that he effectively invented the quad-core processor a decade earlier than seen on PCs. One Naomi board per screen was necessary for the incredible frame rate and graphics technology to run, and the fourth board was used to sync the three screens together. The side screens acted as a kind of semi-3D side view for drivers to watch in their peripheral vision to stop others overtaking. The game was so popular in arcades that it still sits front and center in many arcades to this day.

As Ferrari F355 Challenge was amazing fans of arcade gaming worldwide, AM2 were putting the finishing touches on Project Berkley and had announced its final title: Shenmue. It's long development time had rumoured to cost $70 million, a statement that has only recently been proven false by Yu Suzuki himself. The game actually cost $47 million, which was still by far the biggest budget for a videogame of all time until the Xbox 360 game Too Human was finished. Japanese audiences got Shenmue on the very last day of 1999, with the hype for the title still beyond hysteria since the early Sega Saturn version was shown off years before.

Yu Suzuki's masterpiece was hailed as an instant classic. What emerged was a game that was part exploration, part mystery, part fighting game and part movie. Instead of badging it as an RPG, Yu-san coined the term, FREE, or Full Reactive Eyes Entertainment. When asked to explain the title, he said, УPeople started calling Ultima an RPG. But, they're too УmaniacФ to be accepted in Japan. Being evolved to fit Japanese market, Final Fantasy followed. That's the flow of RPG. But, as a student, I had good chemistry with the adventures and RPGs of Macintosh or Apple computer. I've been interested in evolving that kind of game. And here comes the chance. I thought up a new genre name, FREE. It should be freer, less restrictive. The eyes have the most sensitive, delicate function in the human body.Ф Looking at the incredible visuals in Shenmue, Yu Suzuki was right. The game's graphics were so far ahead of their time they prompted hardware giants like Sony and Microsoft to get their act together and beef up their next generation of systems to compete.

Gaming Target's own review awarded Shenmue a perfect 10 and was not alone in describing it as gaming perfection. The vast majority of magazines and websites loved Shenmue. A few complaints were made about the game's slow pace, which at times involved literally waiting around in-game for a particular time of day. This was seen by Yu Suzuki as a criticism of his vision. He wanted his FREE title to be just that, free. He didn't want to resort to conventional gaming clichщs and have time advance for you. He wanted Shenmue to be a reality. For the players who experienced the game at the time, it was a revelation.



Ryo Hazuki was Yu Suzuki's perfect game icon, someone more recognisable than Akira Yuki from Virtua Fighter, more appealing than his one dimensional arcade characters from the likes of Virtua Cop and above all else, was a flawed human being with a tragedy set down before his life. The tragedy was ours to share, collectively as gamers, and one we still agonisingly await closure on.

Shenmue sold very well in Japan and helped to improve sales of Dreamcast in a major way. The game's cost was not quite recouped, but hopes that the release of Shenmue in the west in November 2000 would make the difference. Sales figures, sadly, would be a major problem for Shenmue's future...