In a recent interview conducted by Famistu, commemorating the 25th anniversary of “Shenmue,” key developers from the original team shared insights into the game’s development and its potential expansion to other platforms. Notably, they discussed the challenges and considerations involved in porting “Shenmue” to the PlayStation 2 and Xbox consoles for the FIRST TIME!
While details are a little limited and pending a proper translation this confirms that Shenmue could indeed run on PS2 and seemingly a good way along in the porting process! Not only that discussions moved into an Original Xbox version of Shenmue 1 Quotes below:
Hirai
Speaking of which, I actually made a PlayStation 2 version of “Chapter 1” once. It was never released, but internally there was a version that ran on the PlayStation 2. I also made an Xbox version, but only “Shenmue II” was released in North America.
Wada
It never made it to release, but it was ported.
Hirai
I also had to fix the source code that I had written in assembler. It was very difficult to convert it back to C.
Wada
Also, speaking of porting, the Xbox version of “Chapter 1” was not released. I think it was due to rights issues, not technical issues. You see, it was tied up with real companies, like TIMEX watches and Coca-Cola drinks. That contract was only for the Dreamcast version of “Chapter 1”, so I think it was shelved for reasons such as not being able to be used on other consoles. –Was the PS2 version actually playable?
Hirai
It worked. We changed the graphics system and made it fully playable.
Wada
The shaders for the Dreamcast were fixed, and the PlayStation 2 had to be programmed to support the shaders. The GPUs for the PlayStation 2 and the Dreamcast are completely different, so we redesigned them and installed them. From a game perspective, if you had wanted to release it, you could have done it.
This is an incredibly exciting revealation on Shenmue’s 25th birthday. Hopefully, more details emerge around this amazing news and it does prompt the thought of ‘what if’ and ‘where would we be now’ had Shenmue released on the wildly successful PS2. What challenges were there? Could there have been issues with licences not being ready to expire? Xbox exclusivity of Shenmue 2, was that a factor? So many questions remain unanswered!
Matt goes into some of this in his video below:
