The word "classic" is used – and abused – in many ways by pop culture pundits. There are albums you’re supposedly not able to live without, and movies that you just have to see before you die. In games, however, the notion of classic status is a little harder to pin down. As a form of entertainment, of expression, of art even, games are much more closely tied to the march of technological progress than any other medium. What begins as revolutionary can often become routine mere days after its Metascore is calculated.

Yet, there are games that resonate with a definite timelessness, games that nobody should pass up the opportunity to play, which aren’t defined by graphics, peripheral interfaces or topical relevance. There is Tetris, and The Secret Of Monkey Island. There is The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time, and Super Mario Bros. 3. Games that set the rules for others to follow, that establish precedents seen across today’s scene.

Released in 1999, director Yu Suzuki’s open-world adventure Shenmue is certainly among these influential essentials. Released in 1999, this vast and ambitious game sees young hero Ryo Hazuki seeking revenge on gangland overlord, Lan Di, for the murder of his father. It has a wealth of inspirational gameplay elements and a level of envelopment quite unrivalled for its time.

It also had a gigantic development price tag. At the time of its release, it was said to have cost Sega a close-to-company-breaking $70m. In 2011, Suzuki revised the figure, claiming the original Shenmue ran up costs of $47m in development and marketing. Either way, it was the most expensive game ever made to that point, and couldn’t hope to recoup its expenditure – every Dreamcast owner would have had to buy two copies for Sega to get back into the black.

It was brave, immense, brilliant … but admittedly, until just the other week, I’d never played it. I’d owned it for a while, but it had never made the perilous journey from "cupboard full of games" to "front room littered with consoles". (See also: the original Half-Life, and please don’t hate me for that.) Now it’s done, finished, behind me, and I’m feeling an emptiness. Because for a while there, I was totally at one with its world. Concluding Shenmue for the first time, 15 years after its debut on Sega’s swansong console, the Dreamcast, I can understand why vociferous fans so rabidly receive the most meagre news regarding a concluding chapter. Shemue, you see, was conceived of as a trilogy but Sega only managed to release two instalments before the Dreamcast sank into oblivion, taking most of the company's cash with it.

But this isn't a story about failure. It is about discovering a wonderful game.

A game of its time?

In 1999, Shenmue arrived to a cacophony of hype – which I managed to avoid, having stalled my Sega-buying habits after the emergence of the 32X (my wife bought me a Dreamcast for Christmas 2012). The money that Suzuki had somehow managed to acquire for chapter one of his epic role-play series was clear to see in every pixel. To gamers of that era, it looked beautiful– in its 9.7/10 review, IGN called the visuals breathtaking.

And in 2014, on a modern HD television, the game still looks handsome. Sure, the colours are somewhat muddy, the skybox heavily pixelated, but the game's setting – the quaint little town of Yokosuka – appears properly alive; certainly more so than the Manhattan of Treyarch’s free-roaming Spider-Man 2, for example, a game which wasn’t released until 2004. A precursor to the Hong Kong of Sleeping Dogs or the LA analogue of GTAV’s Los Santos, it is a living place with shops and resturants, markets and arcades – all explorable, all hiding little treats for Ryo and the player as you both wander about. There are characters to meet and secrets to uncover, but the structure is lose; you are free to roam.

The game’s "Magic Weather" system ensures that, as the days pass, the inexorable cycle of the seasons is reflected on screen. The skies cloud over and rain falls. Snow descends and settles on the small suburb of Sakuragaoka. It is crunchy underfoot. From 15 December, Christmas decorations are put up, stores play Jingle Bells and a cocktail-loving Santa begins to roam the streets. Ryo still wears the same jacket.

Sights and sounds

The visuals, while perhaps not quite cutting edge, were impressive for 1999. Yes, it’s full of graceless facial animations, despite benefitting from some primitive motion-capture work, and the overall aesthetic quality is nowhere close to the standard that the market-exploding PlayStation 2 would begin to introduce, just months after Shenmue’s arrival. But there’s a consistency to these visuals, with tertiary non-player characters treated with the same attention to detail as primary, plot-essential individuals, and the rooted-in-reality world around them, which lends the overall atmosphere a real believability.

Rather less engrossing is the dialogue, which (in English at least) has been responsible for as many moments of accidental hilarity as it has plotline revelations. Ryo’s conversation-closing gambit of “I see” is endlessly employed whether it makes any sense to the proceeding chat or not. Does Ryo really see? What is he even looking at? And then, of course, there is the famous sequence in which the search for revenge requires our hero to track down a group of sailors. Everywhere he goes, he asks unwary inhabitants, "do you know where I can find some sailors?' The guy at the burger stand seems to be secretly in on the suggestive fun of it all:

Whatever he's looking for, whether it's sailors or fizzy pop from a vending machine, Shenmue doesn’t rush Ryo from pillar to post. His key story appointments all happen at pre-determined times in the day, so there is an awful lot of waiting around. It’s a curious set-up. Today, most games allow fast travelling, and even old-school RPGs would let the player’s band of hardy warriors bed down at two in the afternoon in order to skip forward to the next morning’s action. But the way Suzuki saw it, at least for the first Shenmue game (the second allows for fast-forwarding), if you don’t have to be anywhere until midday tomorrow, then you’ve got until then to doss about. And no sleeping until after 8pm, because, well, you’re 18, and you have cool spiky hair and a leather jacket you never take off – the world is open before you.

So, what to do? There are options aplenty. You can head to the arcade and play actual complete versions of Yu Suzuki's own coin-op classics Hang-On and Space Harrier. Or throw some darts. Or get more capsule toy collectibles from dispensers scattered around Yokosuka – keep on popping 100 yen into the right slot and you might eventually get an Eggman to go with your Sonic figure. You can practice your martial arts for when those skills will matter – and on disc three of three, they really do. Did somebody say 70-man brawl?!

Or you can accept a single-ball pool challenge in the game’s MJQ Jazz Bar – just don’t expect to be served anything but cola. Or accumulate cassette tapes so that you can while away the in-game hours listening to the sweet riffs of OutRun soundtrack favourite, "Magical Sound Shower". The clock keeps ticking, sponsored by Timex (no really, Ryo's watch is a Timex and the company actually produced a limited edition model based on the in-game timepiece), and if you don’t head home yourself before 11.30pm, the game takes you straight to bed anyway.

Elsewhere, the game’s combat system betrays its origins as an offshoot of Sega’s Virtua Fighter series. The move-sets that Ryo and his opponents play with are evocative of the classic brawler’s pulverising polygons, and the character of Ryo was originally meant to be VF’s star combatant, Akira – it doesn’t take eagle eyes to note residual physical similarities between the models. And while the fight sequences are crunchingly authentic, we may never forgive Suzuki for the game's other interactive system: the Quick Time Event. Usually fronted by an unskippable cut-scene (as if things couldn't get any worse), they involve using the d-pad and the A and B buttons to navigate a series of choreographed encounters. Suzuki wanted to add visual drama and interacivity to cinematic scenes, but he ended up inventing one of the most hated and abused game mechanics since the hacking mini-challenge.

Here's how it worked:

But luckily, most of the time in Shenmue is spent in what the game calls "Quest Mode", pointing Ryo at people and places, shop fronts and buses, cats and vending machines and capsule toy dispensers, and pressing A to interact with them or the right trigger to zoom in. That's assuming you can steer him into place, as navigational controls aren’t exactly yielding, as this Bits review from 1999 details:

Shenmue is charmingly Japanese, and not just in terms of its signage. The way Ryo behaves – always respectful to his elders, and grateful for the allowance he receives each day; his tidiness with empty drinks cans and toy capsules; how he takes off his shoes when he gets home – is quite unlike 21st-century game protagonists. But just like any GTA series antihero, he does insist on sleeping in his jeans. They are nice jeans, though, as the denim specialist in the commercial hub of Dobuita is happy to tell you. Just don’t ask him about his experiences with Asia Travel Co. In fact no one you speak to had has a good experience with the Asia Travel Co. It is a credit to the intricacy of this world that it contains a dubious travel agency.

Indeed, chatting with the many and varied residents of Shenmue’s world goes a long way to delivering on Suzuki's promise to deliver the “most compelling form of interactivity ever experienced outside the real world”. Dobuita’s greengrocer reveals a love of karaoke, while the chap tending the counter at Funny Bear Burgers is a bit obsessed with his homemade pickles. Sounding rather creepier is the girl who’s always on the till at the Harbour’s Tomato branch (Tomato is the game’s chain of convenience stores) – she claims to know “all about how to get an audition”. For what is never made clear, but she’s sure that Ryo’s far too handsome to be mixing it up with gang members.

Ryo’s awkwardness with the opposite sex, commonly channelled through his interactions with Nozomi, is rather more aggressively illustrated in his chat with a pair of lippy schoolgirls. Try speaking to them where they hang out on the outskirts of Dobuita, and they’ll call Ryo a twit, and a geek, and a pansy. Really push them, and they’ll tell him to “jerk off”. Which seems a bit forward – and would make the least advisable Quick Time Event in gaming history. Ryo is much more comfortable around Tom Johnson, a permanently bopping hot dog salesman. The depth of their friendship only becomes clear towards the game's climax, when Johnson reveals he has to leave Japan for the States, and Ryo finally accepts one of his friend's salmonella-riddled products–as a sign of their eternal friendship. Oh, and Johnson's accent is the least convincing attempt at a regional vernacular since Dick Van Dyke mangled his last line of Cockney nonsense in Mary Poppins:

The cast of characters on show comprises one of Shenmue’s strongest qualities. The bumbling Masayuki Fukuhara, a live-in student at the Hazuki residence; the Gollum-like villain Chai; the Harbour’s mysterious homeless martial artist Shozo Mizuki; the comedic greaser Goro Mihashi – it’s a game packed with memorable faces, some of whom even come accompanied by their own theme tune. Some major characters aren’t even featured in any significant capacity, Suzuki saving them for future instalments. Shenhua Ling stars on the game’s cover, beside Ryo and Lan Di – yet she only appears in dreams, waiting to make her fully voiced bow in Shenmue II.

Less appealing is the game’s instances that Ryo must undertake every task asked of him, even the most menial ones. When he gets a job at the Harbour as a forklift driver, that’s what the player has to do, several in-game days in a row. That's right, you ferry crates from one warehouse to another, the monotony only relieved by lunch breaks and the odd altercation with members of the Mad Angels gang. As for the fussy collision detection during the forklift races? Let’s not go there. I never ranked higher than third, and dreaded each morning’s starting grid. But then, in what other game have you woken up every morning dreading a forklift truck race? It is a kind of genius.

There is also a real sense that, when the game’s ending has been reached, very little has actually been achieved. Now, you could see this as poor design, what with so many loose ends left dangling and Ryo’s own announced admission of, “After all that, I still didn’t get Lan Di.” Some games close out leaving palpable sequel bait in their wake, while others take a more ambiguous approach to final moments. Shenmue goes further than most by basically telling the player that it’s not even started yet, that what you’ve just been through amounts to a prologue, really. The saga is coming, so you’d better pack your things – which Ryo duly does, strolling through Dobuita with a backpack slung over his shoulder in what feels like a reworking of Ryu’s walk-away ending in Street Fighter II.

Play Shenmue in 2014 and it’s just as easy to be absorbed by its fiction as anything that Naughty Dog’s realised in recent years. Its pacing might be glacial compared to the rollercoaster tempo of Uncharted, but slowing things down allows for a greater appreciation of everything that Suzuki and Sega’s AM2 department achieved here. No single aspect of Shenmue is truly outstanding – graphics are great but never awe-inspiring, and while the music’s occasionally majestic it’s just as happy to deliver irritating ditties (Tomato store theme, excepted). But how everything is held together remains quite exquisite, under the closest scrutiny, even by 2014 standards.

“And thus, the saga begins,” are the final words of the closing cinematic, showing our hero – the stern-faced, capsule-toy-collecting, martial-arts-enthusiast, Ryo – sailing away from his native Japan to Hong Kong, on the trail of his father-murdering nemesis. Shenmue II, released in Japan and Europe in late 2001, was something of a last hurrah for the Dreamcast, which, technically, had been discontinued some months earlier. A US Xbox port came later, in October 2002, and transferred to the European market the next spring.

But having only just finished Shenmue, I’m yet to dive properly into this successor – although I have many questions. Will Ryo ever catch up with the wicked Lan Di, the smartly attired Chinaman who left daddy Hazuki mortally wounded inside his own dojo at the beginning of Shenmue? Will Ryo’s sexual frustrations, having tip-toed around the affections of Nozomi Harasaki for the duration of the first game, boil over into an outburst of physical fulfilment with a Hong Kong masseuse? Will he ever change that jacket of his, or at least put it in the wash?

Perhaps answers are forthcoming. Although reports have suggested that the Shenmue trademark has expired in the States, Sony has said it wants to bring some of Sega’s most-celebrated series to its platforms, including Shenmue. Microsoft is also rumoured to have shown interest, although Xbox chief Phil Spencer has said it's unlikely a first-party development team would take on the project. Nevertheless, it looks increasingly likely that a Shenmue III will happen, albeit probably not in the immediate future. Suzuki made an appearance at 2014’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, telling the assembled press and fans that with the “right opportunity” he’d absolutely proceed with a third game, leaving a slide on the screen that said, “To be continued…”.

The biggest stumbling block in bringing Shenmue III into development, let alone getting it gold and taking it to retail, is the money involved. Let's say Shenmue cost $70m. Adjusted for today’s market, it comes to just south of $100m. Now, that’s not an unreasonable amount for the biggest triple-A titles to spend – Grand Theft Auto V reportedly cost Rockstar $265m to make and market and BioShock Infinite allegedly ran up a bill breaching nine figures, although Ken Levine did what he could to cool talk of a $200m outlay. But however you dress it up, Shenmue is old IP which hasn’t gone anywhere, successfully, for over a decade, making a comparable budget incredibly unlikely. A smartphones-only title, Shenmue City, lasted only a year following a December 2010 launch, and never migrated from Japan.

But even if it was happening, now, a Shenmue III costing $100m or more would have to sell several million copies to begin making its money back, based on figures presented in 2013 by industry analyst Billy Pidgeon). Suzuki has admitted he’s exploring the Kickstarter model to get Shenmue III progressing, but while a number of games have seen success through such crowd-funded models, none have generated anywhere near a high-end triple-A-standard amount; Obsidian’s Project Eternity (since retitled Pillars Of Eternity) raised close to $4m, and inExile’s Torment: Tides Of Numenera slightly more, but these are amongst Kickstarter’s most heavily supported projects. A fan-backed Shenmue III would have to rely upon some pretty hefty individual pledges. Did Wayne Rooney ever own a Dreamcast?

“This is clearly not a game,” states Shenmue’s sleeve, “but an experience never to be forgotten.” And while it’s only a day fresh in this memory, I can confidently say that I won’t forget my time adventuring with Ryo Hazuki – even if his journey’s only just begun. Perhaps by the time I finish Shenmue II, further conjecture on a trilogy concluder will have done the rounds.

But then, some don’t want a third game. Eurogamer’s Martin Robinson recently wrote about how he has no desire to see Shenmue III. “Its moment has passed," he opined. "And as intoxicating as [it was] at the turn of the century, it’s hard to see one man isolated from the industry recapturing the grandeur for an audience spoiled by Skyrim and Los Santos, regardless of whatever budget comes his way.”

But I think, right now, I’m in the opposite camp. I’m too close to Ryo to leave him, by all accounts, stuck in a cave somewhere, with no sailors to seek out or Sega-themed mini-figures to stuff into his bottomless pockets. This son needs his closure – as do thousands, if not millions, more.

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