According to DreamcastLive, Shenmue Passport's online rankings are finally back online for the first time in almost 24 years, meaning we can finally find out who the best forklift driver in the world is
In case you don't remember, back when Sega's groundbreaking open-world action-adventure game Shenmue was first released in the late 90s and early 2000s, it shipped with a bonus disc labelled Shenmue Passport. This featured a wealth of additional content and online features designed to improve the player experience, from character biographies for various background characters and location profiles to helpful messages from Ryo's childhood friend Nozomi, to online leaderboards, and reviews showing you how much progress you have currently made based on your saved data.
For those who had already fallen in love with the game's world, the additional disc and its suite of features proved to be a pretty incredible accompaniment to the main game, expanding the replayability of some of Shenmue's mini-games, while giving a ton of additional context not necessarily available in-game. But it would sadly only be fully functional for just 2-3 years before Sega shut down the servers, making its online content inaccessible — even to those who owned the physical disc.
From here, it would unfortunately stay this way for almost two decades, until Dreamcast-Talk's Xiden announced back in 2021 that they had finally managed to restore some, though not all, of the Passport's features, with the online rankings still needing to be reverse-engineered.
It's now been several years since that initial post, and it appears that since then, there has finally been a further breakthrough in bringing the rankings back online, with Xiden posting on February 21st, 2026, that the leaderboard functionality is now available once again (thanks to the help of fellow Dreamcast fans, Flyinghead, Shuouma, and Jial). That means if you want to compete against other players' high scores in Shenmue mini-games like Space Harrier, Hang-On, Darts, Excite QTE 2, QTE Title, the slot machine, 70 Person Free Battle, and the forklift race, it's now finally possible.
According to Dreamcast-Live, the process of getting it up and running is "mostly automatic if using DreamPi or by simply setting your DNS with other connection methods to 46.101.91.123", but Xiden has offered some additional prerequisites:
"ALL USERS must have a unique Dreamcast ID (Using Dream or Flycast for example will not work and you wont even be able to connect to the server if you try… similar to other DC games).
North American users – Using planet web, they must set their Area Code to the current state they live in otherwise the game will put them in an unknown generic ranking category
PAL Users – Must use Dreamkey 3.0, do the setup and select their country. Users from Spain must use Dreamkey 3.1 (Spain Release) to setup their user."
**Extra note for PAL users, users who have a save file that uses 50hz will see a different leader board than the 60hz users. This is because 50hz of course is slower speed. This is something that’s built into Shenmue and it also tells the user this when they try to enter the rankings.”
For further assistance on getting your Dreamcast back online, you may want to check out our guide on the subject.