Shenmue the Animation

Shenmue was originally in development for the Sega Saturn as a role-playing game spin-off of the Virtua Fighter series, with a significant portion already completed, before Sega shifted its main hardware focus to the Dreamcast and the project was moved to that console.

The first Shenmue game was made with a then-unprecedented budget of roughly 7 billion yen, making it, according to Guinness World Records at the time, the most expensive video game ever produced; it was later surpassed by Grand Theft Auto IV, whose budget was about 10 billion yen.

Director Yu Suzuki assembled talent from outside the game industry for Shenmue, including people connected to Hollywood, Studio Ghibli, architects, musicians and actors, an unprecedented approach for a video game production at the time.

Yu Suzuki is credited as the creator of the term 'Quick Time Event' (originally called 'Quick Timer Event' in the game's manual), a system popularized by Shenmue that was later adopted across countless other games and platforms.

For the main character Ryo Hazuki, motion capture was performed by his own voice actor, Masaya Matsukaze, while the battle mode motion capture and martial arts choreography were supervised by a real Japanese Baji quan (hakkyoku-ken) dojo.

Voice actor Takahiro Sakurai, who plays the villain Lan Di in the main series, later revealed he had also voiced a test-mode demo used for an internal company presentation before the game's release.

Despite its massive budget, the first Shenmue sold only about 1.2 million copies worldwide and Shenmue II about 470,000, with Shenmue II's poor sales attributed partly to launching after Sega had already announced the Dreamcast's discontinuation.

In 2015, Yu Suzuki launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund Shenmue III, which reached its initial $1 million goal in just 1 hour and 44 minutes, earning a Guinness World Record for fastest video game to raise $1 million on Kickstarter, and went on to become the highest-funded video game on the platform at the time with over $6.3 million raised.