- Joined
- Aug 21, 2018
- Favourite title
- Shenmue II
Hey everyone. First thread on the forum in over a decade! Happy to be here. You're all wonderful and lovely people.
I wanted to highlight an effort made by myself and eventually the Dojo itself and wider gaming sphere from 2003. The Shenmue III petition. Shortly after the release of Shenmue II when the series' future was put in to doubt, I called to action around June of 2003 and created the Shenmue III petition:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120219053020/http://www.petitiononline.com:80/shen1986/petition.html
As you can see it eventually reached 65K signatures before Petition Online shut down. Very close to the number of eventual backers on Shenmue III's Kickstarter. The story behind it was that at the time I was a games journalist who absolutely adored the Shenmue series, and I wanted to do something significant to help Shenmue III eventually get made. Like many here. So I created the petition, then used my industry connections to get it promoted across gaming news outlets. 2 short weeks later and the petition had rocketed to almost 20K signatures. It spread like wildfire across the Internet, beyond my wildest dreams, clearly tapping in to withheld emotion everyone at the time had, that they desperately wanted Shenmue III to happen so unified and then voiced this desire and intent in the petition, ensuring its success.
Around that time I signed up for the Dojo and created a thread entitled "I am the petition man" or something to that effect and two awesome things happened. First of all the Dojo got in to motion and action almost immediately, helping to promote the petition causing its signature count to further rocket. This was amazing because I believe it was the first ever concerted effort from the Dojo to catalyst Shenmue III in to happening, coming years and years before the Twitter campaigns and so on (Twitter didn't even exist back then!). Do a search for the Shenmue III petition focusing on that particular era and you'll see the effect we had. News posts from major top-tier gaming news outlets, threads on all the popular forums (that went on for years) and it's clear the petition had a huge impact. For example, here's a post from 2008, 5 years after the petition was started:
https://gematsu.com/2008/08/petitions-want-a-shenmue-iii-help-the-cause
The second awesome thing to happen was that at the time we had a member here (I forget his name, but he was an awesome guy) who had a link with Sega's PR, or rather a link to hear from Yu Suzuki's office himself and he got email confirmation from people connected to Yu Suzuki that he had seen and acknowledged the petition, and that he did deeply care about seeing fan's desire for a sequel, and appreciated the concerted effort to make one happen.
Speaking of Yu Suzuki, I did some research and it appears he acknowledged the petition in two interviews:
11/06/2005
Tawianese Game site interview with Yu Suzuki. He is asked about the console series:
"Yu-san wants to complete the story of Shenmue. He knows how the fans want it, including the petition held in the US that gathered 20,000 signatures. Unfortunately, there's no concrete plans for the development of the sequel yet, but if it'd be decided Yu-san himself would like to direct it, no-one else. So, the fans shouldn't worry!"
11/15/2010
(Shenmue Gai Press Conference)
Famitsu one on one interview:
"Shenmue has the image of grand scale," said Suzuki. "But making something of grand scale requires appropriate preparation. I want to make 3 with the same volume as in the past. There have actually been a lot of requests from fans for 3 as well. There were even petitions signed by tens of thousands of people. I wanted to carry out my obligations for the series."
I found this archived on the Dojo itself: http://shenmuedojo.net/new/games/s3preview.html
So this is just wonderful to see even all these years later, that the petition potentially greatly contributed to Shenmue III finally happening. I don't think its impact was particularly huge, with my honest belief being that it was later efforts such as the Tweetathons and more so the efforts from the later 2010s including Sony's building the list and the fan's "Save Shenmue" responses to that particularly to Sony that eventually led to Shenmue III happening - so basically everything that came later. However I do also believe that the petition, as the earliest ever effort to spearhead Shenmue III assisted substantially by the Dojo, did contribute to the game happening. At the very least, it showed Yu Suzuki very early on that fans loved Shenmue I and 2 and we all, en-mass, deeply wanted a sequel. I consider the petition to be one of the best gaming-related things I have ever done, and I am very proud of it succeeding.
The rest is history. Shenmue III is being made now, has a release date, and our dream game is going to happen. Potentially even Shenmue IV! So it's a beyond wonderful time to be a Shenmue fan, and I'm very glad to be part of (and have returned to!) such a loving community that is the Shenmue Dojo.
I wanted to highlight an effort made by myself and eventually the Dojo itself and wider gaming sphere from 2003. The Shenmue III petition. Shortly after the release of Shenmue II when the series' future was put in to doubt, I called to action around June of 2003 and created the Shenmue III petition:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120219053020/http://www.petitiononline.com:80/shen1986/petition.html
As you can see it eventually reached 65K signatures before Petition Online shut down. Very close to the number of eventual backers on Shenmue III's Kickstarter. The story behind it was that at the time I was a games journalist who absolutely adored the Shenmue series, and I wanted to do something significant to help Shenmue III eventually get made. Like many here. So I created the petition, then used my industry connections to get it promoted across gaming news outlets. 2 short weeks later and the petition had rocketed to almost 20K signatures. It spread like wildfire across the Internet, beyond my wildest dreams, clearly tapping in to withheld emotion everyone at the time had, that they desperately wanted Shenmue III to happen so unified and then voiced this desire and intent in the petition, ensuring its success.
Around that time I signed up for the Dojo and created a thread entitled "I am the petition man" or something to that effect and two awesome things happened. First of all the Dojo got in to motion and action almost immediately, helping to promote the petition causing its signature count to further rocket. This was amazing because I believe it was the first ever concerted effort from the Dojo to catalyst Shenmue III in to happening, coming years and years before the Twitter campaigns and so on (Twitter didn't even exist back then!). Do a search for the Shenmue III petition focusing on that particular era and you'll see the effect we had. News posts from major top-tier gaming news outlets, threads on all the popular forums (that went on for years) and it's clear the petition had a huge impact. For example, here's a post from 2008, 5 years after the petition was started:
https://gematsu.com/2008/08/petitions-want-a-shenmue-iii-help-the-cause
The second awesome thing to happen was that at the time we had a member here (I forget his name, but he was an awesome guy) who had a link with Sega's PR, or rather a link to hear from Yu Suzuki's office himself and he got email confirmation from people connected to Yu Suzuki that he had seen and acknowledged the petition, and that he did deeply care about seeing fan's desire for a sequel, and appreciated the concerted effort to make one happen.
Speaking of Yu Suzuki, I did some research and it appears he acknowledged the petition in two interviews:
11/06/2005
Tawianese Game site interview with Yu Suzuki. He is asked about the console series:
"Yu-san wants to complete the story of Shenmue. He knows how the fans want it, including the petition held in the US that gathered 20,000 signatures. Unfortunately, there's no concrete plans for the development of the sequel yet, but if it'd be decided Yu-san himself would like to direct it, no-one else. So, the fans shouldn't worry!"
11/15/2010
(Shenmue Gai Press Conference)
Famitsu one on one interview:
"Shenmue has the image of grand scale," said Suzuki. "But making something of grand scale requires appropriate preparation. I want to make 3 with the same volume as in the past. There have actually been a lot of requests from fans for 3 as well. There were even petitions signed by tens of thousands of people. I wanted to carry out my obligations for the series."
I found this archived on the Dojo itself: http://shenmuedojo.net/new/games/s3preview.html
So this is just wonderful to see even all these years later, that the petition potentially greatly contributed to Shenmue III finally happening. I don't think its impact was particularly huge, with my honest belief being that it was later efforts such as the Tweetathons and more so the efforts from the later 2010s including Sony's building the list and the fan's "Save Shenmue" responses to that particularly to Sony that eventually led to Shenmue III happening - so basically everything that came later. However I do also believe that the petition, as the earliest ever effort to spearhead Shenmue III assisted substantially by the Dojo, did contribute to the game happening. At the very least, it showed Yu Suzuki very early on that fans loved Shenmue I and 2 and we all, en-mass, deeply wanted a sequel. I consider the petition to be one of the best gaming-related things I have ever done, and I am very proud of it succeeding.
The rest is history. Shenmue III is being made now, has a release date, and our dream game is going to happen. Potentially even Shenmue IV! So it's a beyond wonderful time to be a Shenmue fan, and I'm very glad to be part of (and have returned to!) such a loving community that is the Shenmue Dojo.
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