Shenmue Character Models Based on Actual People

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Shenmue analysis at www.phantomriverstone.com
Joined
Jul 28, 2018
Location
Japan
I've written up a post based on research from various sources including old Japanese magazines, bulletin boards, forums posts and magazine articles to bring together all the characters in Shenmue (the first game, mainly) whose character models and/or names were based on actual people. There is a surprisingly large number!

The article talks about each in-game character in detail, compared to the actual person they were based on - and how they look today.

https://www.phantomriverstone.com/2021/05/shenmue-characters-based-on-actual.html

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This is cool. I knew about a couple of these, but most are all new to me. I’m now curious if any of the foreign characters were based on actual gaijin or just made up from random reference images.

Great job as always!
 
Awesome research and very interesting to get to know these NPC origins.

I actually stumbled across the man behind the "Jackpot Guy" myself a few weeks ago while looking up facts about Sonic CD.
Masato Nishimura is credited as the voice of Sonic in that game. So he is THE original voice of Sonic period. He is also responsible for this hidden image. It's really interesting how some of the guys at Sega worked on so many games. Then again a lot of the staff was involved in Shenmue.
 
I actually stumbled across the man behind the "Jackpot Guy" myself a few weeks ago while looking up facts about Sonic CD.
Masato Nishimura is credited as the voice of Sonic in that game. So he is THE original voice of Sonic period. He is also responsible for this hidden image.
I ran across mention of this while researching, having had no idea! He's got some great anecdotes (in Japanese) on Twitter including several about Shenmue that I've been wanting to translate for a future blog post at some point.
 
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