You'll see your neighbours strolling in the park, shopping, and chatting at set times. In the evening, they pull them back down and go home. You can even follow them all day and watch them go about their business, if you don't mind making hero Ryo act like a creep.Įarly in the morning, shop owners will walk from their homes, or the bus stop if they live out of town, to their businesses on Dobuita Street and lift the shutters to start the day's trading. Every character in Shenmue, no matter how minor, has a unique backstory and a daily routine. Whenever you see someone on the street in Yokosuka, they're not just a randomly generated NPC placed there to create the illusion that this is a bustling, populated city: they're a person. But there's something Shenmue does to make its world feel real that I've never seen in another game-not even a lavish, expensive Rockstar one. I could say the same about Red Dead Redemption 2, which is just as good at drawing you into its world through painstaking world-building and attention to detail. Related: I Love The Normandy In Mass Effect Because It Feels Like Home Whenever I play it, I completely lose myself in it.

It's one of the most evocative, transporting settings in video game history, brilliantly capturing the minutiae of everyday life in Japan. The level of visual fidelity is low, but the exquisite art direction and palpable atmosphere transcend its technical shortcomings. But the magic of Shenmue is that, while it may be small, this authentic slice of 1980s Japan is incredibly detailed. It's a tiny world by modern standards, consisting entirely of a couple of small residential areas, a port, and a shopping district. I was lucky enough to visit the real place in 2019, which you can read about here. Shenmue is set in Yokosuka, a Japanese city located about 30 miles south of Tokyo. But it was also way ahead of its time, particularly in how it simulated its world. It's a primitive game in many ways, from a period when console developers were still getting to grips with the possibilities of 3D. But when you consider that Red Dead Redemption 2 reportedly cost Rockstar a staggering $540 million, that doesn't seem like much at all. At the turn of the millennium it was the most expensive video game ever made, costing $70 million to develop-which would be around $110 million today.

It first launched for the Dreamcast back in 1999-yet, remarkably, it still does some things better than modern games released over 20 years later. Shenmue, a martial arts adventure created by Sega legend Yu Suzuki, is old.

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