Update [Thu 21st Dec, 2023 13:45 GMT]: As spotted by the Shenmue community site Shenmue Dojo, George Kitchen's eagerly anticipated new Shenmue fan game is now available to download.
The game is called Shenmue Dreams of Saturn and is a 10-15 hour adventure set before Shenmue 1 that sees Ryo exploring Dobuita to hunt down 25 Santa-Chans hidden around the world, in order to win a Sega Saturn. It is currently available on PC (with a Mac version on the way). You can download it directly from the Shenmue Dojo site at the link below:
Original Story [Mon 30th Oct, 2023 12:35 GMT]: Shenmue Dojo, the popular Shenmue fansite, posted a first look at a promising new fan game that will be arriving on PC on December 15th.
The short fan game called A Shenmue Story is being developed by the musician George Kitchen in Unity and will take place at Christmas. From the trailer, it looks to be primarily played from a first-person perspective, with some third-person sections for QTEs, and will also include a bunch of new minigames, such as an Ecco The Dolphin lucky hit machine, a Sonic Spinball arcade machine, and a game based on NiGHTS into Dreams. It will also feature tons of Chobu Chan mascots to find and various new capsules to obsessively try and collect.
Launched in Japan back in 1999 (Europe and North America would have to wait another year to get their hands on it), Shenmue for the Sega Dreamcast is rightly regarded as one of the best games ever made, thanks to its moving story of a teenager trying to avenge his murdered father and its incredible open-world featuring a ridiculous amount of detailed interactions and memorable characters.
Its creator Yu Suzuki planned the game's story to span multiple titles, but so far, only two sequels have ever made it out: Shenmue II (originally released for the Dreamcast in 2001), and Shenmue III (released on PS4 and Windows in 2019). This has led some of its most dedicated fans to campaign on social media for the series to make another comeback and finish the story once and for all.
Given the last Shenmue game took almost eighteen years to come out, we're anticipating a long wait should that eventually become a reality. So we're more than happy to see fans step in and produce their own Shenmue adventures in the meantime. We'll post a link to the fangame once it is released.